Everything that there is to know about E. Wheeler, the mysterious turn of the century English mushroom artist of Clevedon & the Severn Valley.

The signature, E. Wheeler appears on the bottom right hand corner of most of the grey pages these mushrooms sit on. To be fair, “sit” isn’t the right word. The fungus “pops” on the paper. It punches out, alive. It lives.

Whilst not every page is signed, the hand that rendered this fungus so fabulously is very consistent in all of the images. So, we can be fairly certain that E. Wheeler, whoever he or she was, painted all of them

E.W. must have painted them right there in the woods too as some pages have the name of a wood marked. In the period between 1883 & 1906.

E.W. had wonderful period cursive handwriting and on each page, in ink, annotated each specimen with its latin name. E.W. knew their mushrooms.

According to London’s Wellcome Collection where these muchrooms live on a dark shelf somewhere, these mushrooms were possibly painted as part of an art class in the Severn region.

See also

1877. Zoological wallcharts by Hinrich Nitsche, the German Zoologist who spotted a microscopic invertibrate’s anus and had a vemonous African snake named after him.

Nature

Or perhaps in Clevedon, Avon. Or both.

Either way, what E. W. has created is a kind of mystery field guide to the mushrooms that featured in the locations in his or her life.