Augusta Innes Withers enjoyed a long and successful career as a natural history illustrator and flower and bird painter. Widely admired during her lifetime for her meticulously detailed and botanically accurate work, she exhibited prolifically, at the Royal Academy (1829-1846), the Royal Society of British Artists (1832-1865) and the New Watercolour Society. One of the earliest members of the Society of Women Artists, she exhibited 43 works with them between 1857-1875. She was appointed flower painter to Queen Adelaide in 1833 and flower and fruit painter to Queen Victoria in 1864, as well as being a painter to the Royal Horticultural Society.

Withers’s work falls into two categories: the botanical illustrations she contributed to leading periodicals such as The Botanist, the Pomological Magazine and Curtis’s Botanical Magazine and books such as Robert Thompson’s The Gardener’s Assistant (1859) and (in collaboration with Sarah Drake) James Bateman’s Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala (1837-1843), and highly imaginative watercolour compositions that combine elements of landscape and still life with the painstaking depiction of flowers and birds. This watercolour is a particularly vivid and ambitious example of the latter type of work, depicting a close-up view of two robins – one half-hidden within its nest – on a hillside overgrown with ivy, hart’s-tongue and buckler ferns and studded with flints (one of which, at centre, has been freshly broken to reveal its unweathered colouration and patterning). The vibrant colour – heightened with the judicious use of gum arabic – and inventive composition evoke a slice of landscape teeming with life and show Withers at her best. The fusion of scientific exactitude and imagination places her work within a distinguished lineage of female botanical artists like Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750) and Barbara Regina Dietzsch (1706-1783), whilst the subject matter also invites comparison with her contemporary William Henry Hunt (1790-1864) and also with Mary Moser (1744-1819), one of the two female founding members of the Royal Academy who was renowned for her flower painting.