18 facts about Caroline Maria Applebee

Caroline Maria Applebee (c. 1786 – 16 September 1854) was an English artist, mostly in watercolour.

Born in London, but baptized at St Margaret’s Church, Canterbury, on 16 May 1787, Caroline Maria Applebee was the eldest daughter of the Rev. John Applebee, a Church of England clergyman, by his marriage to Grace Lukyn. She never married and spent most of her liveliness in and a propos Colchester. A graduate of St John’s College, Oxford, her father was appointed a Prebendary of Lincoln in 1795 and the adjacent year became Rector of East Thorpe, Essex, which brought the Applebee relatives to Colchester like Caroline Maria was not quite eleven. Her father died in 1825, aged 69.

Applebee was a friend of Charles Lamb, who addressed an acrostic to her which was first published in 1830. In 1834 she was a subscriber to the pronouncement of Two Lectures on Taste, by Dr James Carter, in 1838 to the message of a further translation of three plays by Lessing, and in 1841 to Emily Elizabeth Willement’s A Bouquet from Flora’s Garden. In 1841 and 1851 Applebee was recorded as booming at 53, Crouch Street, Colchester, with several servants. In 1851 her rank or profession was acknowledged as “Lady of merit”.

Applebee’s play a role features a wide variety of flora and fauna known in the 19th century, especially rare and exotic ones. Some 323 of her watercolour paintings and drawings are in the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley Library. She benefited greatly from the botanical gardens which for much of her dynamism were at the summit of East Hill, Colchester, but in 1852, two years previously her death, they were developed for extra housing.

In April 1851, Applebee was breathing at 53, Crouch Street, Colchester, with four female servants and once a visitor, Mary Bullock. She acknowledged her age as 65 and her place of birth as London. She died at Blackheath on 16 September 1854, aged 69, and was buried in the churchyard of St Mary at the Walls, Colchester. In her will, she left houses, diamonds, carriages, and a painting said to be by Velazquez, as without difficulty as three albums of her flower drawings, the last going to her niece Louisa Clare Williams, later Mrs Turner. The three albums were sold separately to the Royal Horticultural Society, one of them by a Mrs M. Sugden, believed to have been Louisa’s daughter, Maud. Maud Turner married William Sugden in Colchester in 1882.

Applebee’s play-act was going on for unknown until the invention of lump colour printing in the second half of the 20th century and is now used mostly to illustrate diaries and books nearly plants.