1931 - Bean Portraits, How I Love Them!

I have always loved lovingly painted bean portraits.  I figured out how to do it may years ago with my watercolors.  It was fun.  But this job must have been quite the challenge since the people who were critiquing the work really knew their beans!!  I wonder if my practice beans are still in my old sketchbook...
I wish this was a better scan but many thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Lab for having one as good as this.  Others I have found online are bigger but awful quality.

These color plates are from 1931 work, The Vegetables of New York. From the preface: 'The Vegetables of New York is intended to be a more or less complete record of the vegetables grown in New York State."  

Don't overlook the names! There are some good stories in them.

Below is my old friend the Lazy Wife pole bean :-)

Lazy Wife's Pole Beans!

Miss Mary Martin...a seedswoman in the tradition of the
other Misses I posted about earlier.

I thought I had done something on Miss Mary, but I can't find it so here is...perhaps again, but there are some fun extras here this time.
I found a very interesting anecdote about the Lazy Wife's Beans which is worth reading if you grow pole beans!! You can still buy seeds; at Amishland Heirloom Seeds, for one.

"This is an old bean intoduced by German immigrants in the United States about 1810. It is one of our oldest beans to be documented. It got its name because it was one of the first beans to be "stringless", a real boon to the busy housewives of the day. It is very prolific and sets its beans in clusters that are easy to pick, another "lazy" thing that makes it great." 

I like her earliest portrait.  The photos on the later catalogs look sort of odd -snooty, standoffish - too well dressed?




Speaking of photos, these catalogs are still mostly engraved plates (which I love) but, horror! she has a handful of nasty blurry photos in the 1900s catalogs. Yuck.

Miss Mary Martin does have wonderful illustrations usually...some examples are below.



artist, A. Blanc, who did the Christmas Orchid had a great time.
I looked him up and found this ad.





These two have  style.  I don't see any signature.  Miss Mary had an eye for friendly engravings.













These ads were in magazines... the first one is more widely known now as KUDZU!!!!