Roberta Cowing
Roberta Cowing Throckmorton was an American artist, employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Early life
Roberta Cowing was born to William Jackson Cowing and Matilda Helen Crupper Cowing in October of 1860, in Rushville, Rush County, Indiana, USA. She had one older brother, Frank Myrtle Cowing.Career
Cowing was employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to paint watercolors of fruit and nut varieties, as part of the USDA's Pomological Watercolor Collection. The collection includes paintings of Prunus salicina, Pyrus communis, and Rubus.She made illustrations of plants collected in an 1891 botanical survey of Death Valley; the work was published in an educational journal.
Collections from the U.S. National Herbarium published twenty-one drawings of plants collected in Death Valley in their November 1893 issue, seventeen of which were signed by Roberta Cowing.
Today, Cowing's work can be found in Carnegie Mellon University's , as well as in several USDA government publications:Bulletin No. 1-29, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888Peach Yellows: A Preliminary Report, Department of Agriculture, Botanical Division, 1888Bulletin, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888Yearbook of Agriculture, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1889
Cowing was active in Washington, D.C. from 1887 to 1920.
She resided at 1311 13th Street N.W. Washington, D.C.