Deborah Griscom Passmore

Deborah Griscom Passmore (1840–1911) was a botanical illustrator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture who specialized in paintings of fruit. Her work is now preserved in the USDA's Pomological Watercolor Collection, and she has been called the best of the early USDA artists. She rose to lead the USDA staff artists, and she became the most prolific of the group, contributing one-fifth of the 7500 paintings in the Pomological Watercolor Collection.

Deborah Griscom Passmore was born in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, on July 17, 1840, the fifth and last child of Everett Griscom Passmore (1787–1868), a farmer, and Elizabeth K. Knight (c.1800–1845), a teacher and preacher for an orthodox branch of Quakers. The youngest of the family, with two older brothers and two older sisters, Passmore was given the forenames Deborah Griscom after her paternal grandmother, who was a first cousin of Betsy Ross. Her mother died while she was still a child, and Passmore was educated at the nearby boarding school where her mother had taught before her marriage. She went on to train as an artist at the School of Design for Women and the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Her first cousin Deborah Passmore Gillingham (1820–1877) was also a botanical artist, though an amateur whose work was not published until recently.

Passmore followed up her Philadelphia art training with a year studying art in Europe. There, she found inspiration in the botanical illustrations of Marianne North at Kew Gardens, England, and when she returned to the United States, she began painting the wildflowers of America as well as lilies and other flowers. She hoped to publish these watercolors under the title Flowers in Water Color: Wildflowers of America, but she never managed to do so and the manuscript is now in the USDA's Special Collections. Passmore prided herself on delineating her subjects with minute accuracy and sometimes used as many as a hundred washes to get the desired effect. The noted botanist Edward Lee Greene was a great admirer of Passmore's flower paintings.

Passmore also painted cacti, and some of her watercolors were printed in a 1919 work entitled The Cactaceae that was published by the Carnegie Institution.

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