In Full Bloom: Faith Fyles at the Ottawa Art Gallery
The Botanist Who Painted: Discovering Faith Fyles, Twice
On finding Faith Fyles at the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum, and again at the Ottawa Art Gallery
I met Faith Fyles (1875–1961) before I knew her name. A few days before I ever set foot in the Ottawa Art Gallery, I'd wandered into the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum on the grounds of the Central Experimental Farm, expecting tractors and dairy barns, and found myself instead in front of a small exhibition called The Art of Science: A Century of Illustrating Agriculture at the Central Experimental Farm. Its premise was simple but effective: art and science have long been companions, and drawing and painting require the same close observation that sits at the heart of scientific work.
First Encounter: The Art of Science
Artists have been working at the CEF since 1913, and this exhibition traced that whole century-long tradition — four artists who supported scientific research at the farm over the past hundred years. Arthur Kellett, Faith Fyles, and Frank Hennessey created their artworks between 1913 and 1948; the fourth, Jessica Hsiung, is Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's current scientific illustrator, still maintaining that legacy today with both traditional and contemporary techniques.
Fyles was one name among several in that room — one contributor to a hundred years of illustrating agriculture, her work sitting alongside Kellett's and Hennessey's as evidence that this farm had always valued art as a form of scientific record-keeping. It was a good introduction, grounded in the actual fields and dairy barn the farm has run since 1886, but it was an introduction to a tradition more than to a person.
One wall groups three of her watercolours together (seen above): Enie pear, 1930, showing the whole fruit above its cross-section in her signature format; Williard strawberry, 1924, a full stem of leaves and berries labelled simply “WILLIARD” in the same decorative lettering the USDA artists established; and Josselyn gooseberry, 1924, a branch heavy with dusky pink and deep red fruit, each berry rendered with a botanist's attention to the faint speckling on its skin.
Every work signed simply “Faith Fyles” in the corner — a quiet signature for work that was, at the time, largely anonymous government labour. She retired from the Department of Agriculture in 1931 after more than twenty years of service, but she never stopped painting, exhibiting regularly at the Ottawa Art Association and the Royal Canadian Academy right up through the 1940s.
Second Encounter: In Full Bloom
A few days later, at the Ottawa Art Gallery, I got the rest of the story. Faith Fyles: In Full Bloom Floraisons is billed as the first retrospective dedicated to her, and it felt like it — room after room of her actual watercolours, her biography laid out along a long timeline, her legacy placed in direct conversation with contemporary artists responding to her work. This time she wasn't one name among four; she had the whole show to herself.
Fyles was born in Cowansville, Quebec, the seventh of ten children. Her father, Thomas Fyles, was an Anglican priest and botanist who made real contributions to Canadian entomology — a love of the natural world, and a habit of looking closely at it, clearly ran in the family. She studied flora with him as a child and took drawing lessons alongside her scientific education, a combination that would define her entire career. She entered McGill University on scholarship and graduated in 1900, mentored there by Carrie Derick, the first woman to teach and conduct research in botany at a Canadian university.
The gallery filled in exactly what the museum had left out. In 1910, Fyles was hired by the federal Department of Agriculture as a seed analyst — dismissed at the time as “women's work” because it was repetitive and low-paid. She didn't stay there long. In 1911, she was promoted to assistant botanist, becoming the first woman to hold a scientific position in the Canadian civil service. Over the next decade she did fieldwork across the country, collected and identified plants, studied plant diseases, and even discovered a new species of fungus, which she documented in the journal Phytopathology. Then, in 1920, she made a striking choice: she accepted a pay cut to leave her scientific post entirely and become the first artist employed in the Horticulture Division of the CEF — the very role the museum exhibit had already told me about, except now I understood what she'd given up to take it.
A Scientist's Eye, an Artist's Hand
What makes her watercolours so compelling, once you know that history, is that they were never just decorative. Her appointment was modeled on a similar art program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which had employed mostly women artists since the 1880s to document new fruit varieties as they were bred. Fyles adopted their format: painting each apple whole above its cross-section, adding the variety's name in decorative lettering, and capturing distinguishing anatomical details like colour and internal structure. Over her career she painted hundreds of these watercolours documenting fruit varieties developed at the Central Experimental Farm — including the Enie pear, bred right there on the farm.
One wall groups three of her watercolours together: Enie pear (1930), showing the whole fruit above its cross-section in her signature format; Williard strawberry (1924), a full stem of leaves and berries labelled simply “WILLIARD” in the same decorative lettering the USDA artists established; and Josselyn gooseberry (1924), a branch heavy with dusky pink and deep red fruit, each berry rendered with a botanist's attention to the faint speckling on its skin. Every plate is signed simply “Faith Fyles” in the corner — a quiet signature for work that was, at the time, largely anonymous government labour. She retired from the Department of Agriculture in 1931 after more than twenty years of service, but she never stopped painting, exhibiting regularly at the Ottawa Art Association and the Royal Canadian Academy right up through the 1940s.
Two Museums, One Fuller Picture
Both exhibitions, it turns out, come from the same source: In Full Bloom Floraisons is presented jointly by the Ottawa Art Gallery and Ingenium — Canada's Museums of Science and Innovation — drawing on more than forty works from Ingenium's own collection, the same institution behind the museum exhibit I'd wandered into days earlier. Having now seen both, I don't think either on its own would have given me the full picture. The museum told me why Fyles mattered institutionally, situating her inside a hundred-year tradition of people documenting agricultural science at the CEF, alongside Kellett, Hennessey, and Hsiung, grounded in the same fields and dairy barn where that work actually happened. The gallery told me who she was — gave her a name, a biography, a retirement, a retrospective of her own — and placed her legacy in dialogue with contemporary artists still asking the same questions about land, labour, and scientific craft that she navigated a century ago.
Seeing her recognized in both places, a few days apart, felt like watching the same person get credited twice, in two different currencies: one institutional and quiet, folded into the ongoing record of a working farm; one public and overdue, a solo show finally built around her name. Together they say something neither says alone — that Faith Fyles's contribution to Canadian agricultural research wasn't a footnote to be rediscovered once, but a body of work substantial enough to anchor two very different institutions telling two very different kinds of stories about the same career.
Why I Keep Thinking About Her
What stays with me is the way her two careers were never really separate, either. She didn't stop being a botanist when she picked up a brush, and she didn't stop being an artist when she was collecting specimens in a Hull swamp with her father. Her watercolours are precise enough to function as scientific illustration and beautiful enough to hang in a gallery — which is, I think, exactly the point being made by two institutions choosing, independently and together, to keep telling her story.
By the time you read this, In Full Bloom Floraisons will have closed at the Ottawa Art Gallery — today is its last day, in fact, which is part of why I wanted to write this down while it was still fresh. If you missed it, the good news is that half of the story is still there: The Art of Science at the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum, out on the Central Experimental Farm itself, is where I met Fyles first, and it's the piece of this that isn't going anywhere on a closing date. Go stand in front of her watercolours there, in the same building where that century of illustrating agriculture actually happened, and keep an eye out for wherever In Full Bloom travels or resurfaces next — a retrospective this overdue rarely stays contained to one room for long.
Have you seen work by a scientist-artist that changed how you think about a field? I'd love to hear about it.
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