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‘First sketch of Everest’ credited to pioneering botanist

Naturalist Joseph Hooker may have been the first westerner to draw the world’s highest peak.

The Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London has identified a line drawing from its archives as a sketch of Mount Everest made by Hooker on his travels in 1848.

everest kew sketch.jpg


Hooker, who was director of Kew between 1865 and 1885 and a great friend of Charles Darwin, travelled widely while collecting botanical specimens. His journeys took him from what is now South Africa to Antarctica and India, where his explorations of 1848 were recorded in his Himalayan Journals.

In 1871 he wrote, “A man called yesterday who had been up to my most distant passes in the Himalaya—the first man to do it since 1848! … I must be vain enough to tell you that he found my book a ‘miracle of accuracy’, and [said] that he could find nothing I had not taken note of.” (PDF, huge.)

Kew also has a watercolour based on the sketch by Walter Hood Fitch from 1850 (below) and both are currently on display in its Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art.

“To our knowledge there are no other earlier representations of Everest by a European, in which case this discovery could be one of the most important findings in Kew’s archives,” says Stephen Hopper, Kew’s director (press release).

everest kew water.jpg

Image top: sketch by Joseph Dalton Hooker (RBG Kew).

Image lower: watercolour by Walter Hood-Fitch (RBG Kew).

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