Clarissa Munger Badger was a mid 19th century American botanical illustrator best known for several volumes of flower paintings, some accompanied by poetry.
Background
Clarissa W. Munger was born in East Guilford, Connecticut, in 1806 to George Munger, a portrait painter and engraver. Clarissa, her older brother George, and her younger sister Caroline all become artists themselves, with Caroline specializing in portraits like her father and Clarissa in botanical art
Career
They had five children, of whom two survived to adulthood, both becoming doctors. In 1848, Clarissa Munger Badger privately published A Forget-Maine-Not: Flowers from Nature with Selected Poetry, a volume of poetry by William Cullen Bryant, Lydia Sigourney, Mary Howitt, and others illustrated with 13 of her flower paintings. This may have provided a model for her 1859 book Wild Flowers Drawn and Colored from Nature (informally known as The Wild Flowers of America), which was illustrated with 22 plates of individual common flowers such as trailing arbutus, purple violet, cardinal flower, and harebell.
The poet Emily Dickinson owned a copy of this book
Clarissa"s third book, Floral Belles from the Green-House and Garden, was published in 1867 with 16 hand-colored lithographic plates typically showing two or three flowers in clusters or bouquets. As with her first book, the flower paintings were accompanied by poetry, in this case poems about the flowers depicted.
A sketch written when Badger was 75 remarks on the "feeling and delicacy" of her watercolors and remarks that she was still painting flowers at that advanced age. The popularity of Badger"s graceful, stylized paintings in her own day was "dwarfed by her male counterparts.
Only now is she being applauded as a fine botanical artist".