Alice Margaret Coats


Alice Margaret Coats was a British watercolor painter, engraver, woodcut artist, and author. She was a member of the Central Club of Wood-Engravers in Colour. She is best known for botanical and horticultural works.

Life

Alice Margaret Coats was born on 15 June 1905 in Handsworth, Birmingham to a Scottish clergyman, the Rev. Robert Hay Coats, and his wife Margaret, who was from Glasgow. Coats was educated at Edgbaston High School before studying at the Birmingham Central School of Art between 1922 and 1928, at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and in Paris during the 1930s at Andre Lhote's school. Coats produced book illustrations, flower paintings on silk, colour woodcuts, and landscape paintings in both oil and watercolours.
Between 1933 and 1939 Coats was an organizing secretary of the ‘Birmingham Group’ of artists and during World War II from 1940 to 1945 served in the Land Army helping to cultivate land on which Birmingham University housing was later built.
In the 1950s, her artistic career was cut short by arthritis and since then she concentrated on her writings and the study of horticultural history. Coats wrote a series of scholarly articles and books on horticultural history and biography that were recognized by the Royal Horticultural Society and the University of Birmingham.
In 1965, Coats joined the newly founded Garden History Society and contributed articles to Garden History.
Her first book Flowers and their History was published in 1956. Among her other works were Garden Shrubs and their Histories, The Quest for Plants: a History of the Horticultural Explorers, The Treasury of Flowers, and Lord Bute. Her book The Book of Flowers included woodcuts, engravings and watercolors.

Exhibitions