Cool Chick from History

There is a pretty great blog out there in the internet universe called Cool Chicks from History. The writer of this blog posts a different female historical figure every day and highlights that woman's badass accomplishments. It is a wealth of historical information and images that tend to get left out of your average history class. There was recently a call for illustrations of different cool chicks from history and I volunteered!

I thought I would get to choose someone from history who has inspired me (I was thinking of doing Nampeyo, who I did research on in college) but as it turned out, I was assigned someone, which ultimately I think was a great way of going about it because I got the chance to learn about someone who I was not already familiar with. The woman I was given was Jane Colden, a Botanist who lived in Upstate New York in the 1700's. I was pretty excited because I also am from Upstate NY (though not exactly the same part, she was in the Hudson Valley and I am from the Finger Lakes).

I learned pretty quickly that there are no known images of Jane Colden which made it an interesting creative challenge. I looked at portraits and picture frames from the eighteenth century for reference as well as some paintings of her family members that I was able to find.

I learned that Jane Colden was known for studying gardenias, among other plants, and using ink to transfer images of plants, so I also worked in ink and showed her making notes and sketches of a gardenia. I imagined her at a desk in her house in Upstate New York. Surrounding her portrait are more gardenias and other plants that she studied.

She faced the same sexism that was unfortunately standard at the time and was not really acknowledged for her accomplishments during her life. She discovered some previously unclassified plants whose scientific name "Coldenia" is actually referring to her father who was also a botanist, even though it was she who discovered the plants. 

I'm totally glad I know about her!