Edgar Dell

Who was Edgar Dell?

Edgar Dell was a Western Australian painter best known for his watercolour paintings of that state's wildflowers.

Born in England in 1901, he emigrated to Western Australia in 1924, where he bought and cleared a bush block in Paulls Valley in the Shire of Kalamunda, establishing an orchard there. The block came to be known as The Dell; this name has subsequently also been extended to a nearby recreation site. During the Great Depression he made a living cutting timber in the bush, and also painted wildflowers for West Australian Newspapers Ltd., which published one painting a week in a colour supplement to The Western Mail These were accompanied by a botanical description by Charles Gardner, then Government Botanist, and were so popular that they were compiled into book form and published under the title Western Australian Wildflowers in 1935. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1958, and again in the 1970s under the title Wildflowers of Western Australia. This ran to numerous editions, albeit with ever-diminishing numbers of Dell's plates.

Little is known of Dell's later life, but as late as 1973 he was still living on the Paulls Valley block that he cleared in the 1930s. He died in 2008, at the age of 106.