Arabella Elizabeth Roupell
1817–1914 · English flower painter
Arabella Elizabeth Roupell (1817-1914) was an English flower painter. She is best known for an anonymous set of South African flora plates published in 1849 under the title "Specimens of the Flora of South Africa by a Lady".
The daughter of a rector in Edgmond, she married Thomas Boone Roupell, an East India Company official, in 1840. In 1843 she joined him at the Cape Colony, where she painted local flowers and won the admiration of the botanist Nathaniel Wallich, who brought her work to William Jackson Hooker. Ten plates were published with text by William Henry Harvey, in a limited print run of about 110 copies, which made the work rare and highly sought after by collectors.
After the East India Company was dissolved in 1858, the family settled in Berkshire. Many of her unpublished paintings resurfaced in South Africa in the 1930s and were issued in 1964 and 1975. The species Protea roupelliae, named in her honour by Carl Meissner, keeps her memory alive.