Eugene Otto Weber Murman Watercolors of California Flora, 1941-1961

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Summary

Creators:
Murmann, Eugene Otto Weber
Abstract:
The Murman collection consists of 495 original watercolors and 26 photographs of California native plants, representing 85 different families and ca. 460 species. The paintings are scientifically accurate as well as artistic, each showing details of a branch and enlarged paintings of the flowers, fruit, and other diagnostic parts. Murman, originally a Russian banker, trained as a commercial artist after his emigration to the U.S. in 1905 and became a furniture designer in Los Angeles in 1906. After his retirement, he began traveling throughout California making preliminary sketches, color notes, and photographs of plants and collecting dried specimens; using these, Murman produced his body of watercolors in his home studio. Each series in the Container List represents a plant family. Each entry represents one plate, listing the scientific and common name, date & place of specimen collection, plus notes.
Extent:
52 linear feet (26 boxes and 78 35-mm. slides)
Language:
Materials are in English.
Preferred citation:

[Identification of item], Eugene Otto Weber Murman watercolors of California flora (Collection 46). Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library History and Special Collections Division, University of California, Los Angeles.

Background

Scope and content:

Eighty-five families of California plants are represented by Murman's watercolor plates, approximately 460 species. Specimens came from many California counties from north to south, with a fair number also collected in Oregon, Arizona, and other western locations. Each plate consists of an 8 x 10" watercolor (or photograph) on a 15 x 20" board.

Murman provided family, genus, and species (scientific and common names), location and date of specimen collection for each of the plates. The plates were numbered in the order of their accession at UCLA, so plate (and box) numbers serve only as location indicators; there is no taxonomic order to them. Murman's nomenclature is occasionally outdated, so some ingenuity and patience may be needed to locate a specific plant in the finding aid.

Each SERIES in the Container List represents a plant Family. Brackets indicate earlier or variant forms of the scientific family name; parentheses indicate the common name; the dates indicate inclusive collection dates. The "International Plant Name Index" (IPNI) (https://www.ipni.org) was used as the authority for placing a plate within a particular family (which sometimes differs from Murman's classification), and The National Plant Data Center's "Plants Database" (https://plants.usda.gov) served as the authority for the common family name used. Each ENTRY within a series represents a Murman plate. The genus, species, and common names of the specimens are in the form provided by Murman; no effort was made to standardize or update them. Again, the date is the date of specimen collecting; the notes include collecting location(s).

Biographical / historical:

Eugene O. Murman (Apr. 18, 1874 - Mar. 17, 1962) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and developed an early interest in natural history and nature photography. After jobs as translator and clerk, he joined the foreign exchange department of the Russian Commercial and Industrial Bank and remained there until his immigration to the United States in 1905. Unable to find a banking position in New York, Murman decided on a change of career and spent a year in Germany being trained as a commercial artist. In 1906 he moved to Los Angeles where he soon became head designer for the California Furniture Company, which subsequently became W. & J. Sloane; he stayed with this firm for thirty-four years. During his free hours and on holidays he amassed a fine butterfly collection and became familiar with the plants and birds of his new home. His collection of hand-colored lantern slides was used to illustrate lectures on various natural history topics; these slides now reside in the Hancock Library of Biology & Oceanography at the University of Southern California. The butterfly collection was given to the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.

After his retirement, Murman and his second wife began a project to document the California flora in watercolors. Frequent collecting trips took them to many parts of the state and acquainted them with various botanists, forest rangers, and park naturalist, many of whom cooperated by sending living specimens of flowers and fruit, and assisted in identification of plants. Murman made color notes and preliminary sketches in the field and took black-and-white photographs for form and size, while Mrs. Murman took color photographs of the plants in their native habitat. With the aid of these field notes and photographs, as well as dried specimens, Murman then produced his outstanding series of watercolors in his home studio. His work received wide recognition, and just before his death he completed copies of four paintings for the collection of botanical art in the Hunt Botanical Library, Carnegie Institute of Technology.

Acquisition information:
In the late 1940s or early 1950s, Murman began selling these watercolor plates to the UCLA Library's Department of Special Collections. At his death in 1962 the UCLA collection numbered 521 plates. In 1984, to mark the occasion of naming the UCLA Biomedical Library in honor of Louise M. Darling, its first librarian, the UCLA Library Special Collections Department transferred the Murman watercolors to the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library.
Processing information:

Processed by Pat L. Walter, 2002

Collections are processed to a variety of levels depending on the work necessary to make them usable, their perceived user interest and research value, availability of staff and resources, and competing priorities. Library Special Collections provides a standard level of preservation and access for all collections and, when time and resources permit, conducts more intensive processing. These materials have been arranged and described according to national and local standards and best practices.

We are committed to providing ethical, inclusive, and anti-racist description of the materials we steward, and to remediating existing description of our materials that contains language that may be offensive or cause harm. We invite you to submit feedback about how our collections are described, and how they could be described more accurately, by filling out the form located on our website: Report Problematic Content and Description in UCLA's library collections and archives.

Physical location:
Stored off-site. All requests to access special collections material must be made in advance using the request button located on this page.
Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Indexed terms

Subjects:
Botany -- California

Access and use

Restrictions:

Open for research. All requests to access special collections materials must be made in advance using the request button located on this page.

Terms of access:

Property rights to the physical objects belong to UCLA Library Special Collections. All other rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.

The copyright for the plates does not reside with UCLA. Some plates, mostly of conifers and other California trees, have been published by the University of California Press or Cachuma Press; rights to these plates will pass into the public domain in 2012.

Preferred citation:

[Identification of item], Eugene Otto Weber Murman watercolors of California flora (Collection 46). Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library History and Special Collections Division, University of California, Los Angeles.

Location of this collection:
Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library
12-077 Center for Health Sciences, Box 951798
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1798, US
Contact:
(310) 825-6940
AskLSC@library.ucla.edu
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