Anne Rudge

[2] Of Huguenot descent, Peter Nouaille's family originated from Nismes in France, his father having migrated to England to escape persecution.

Her husband instructed her in the skills necessary to be a successful scientific and botanical illustrator, in which she exhibited "... a consistent style and exacting detail in the sections on her plates [that] could only have come from intense personal study and interest.

His house, which was constantly frequented by the most distinguished literary characters of the time, both foreign and native, afforded her the opportunity of acquiring a perfect knowledge of the modern languages, and besides French, Italian, and Spanish, she obtained a competent acquaintance with the Latin, and since, with the friendly assistance of the late Reverend Stephen Weston, studied with considerable success the Hebrew, for the purpose of reading the Bible in the original.

Her skill in drawing and etching was equal if not superior, to her knowledge of music, copying from nature only with fidelity and precision, both in landscape and natural history; her knowledge of botany, acquired from the instructions of her husband, enabled her to illustrate his treatises on various new species of plants from New Holland, &c. published in the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th volumes of the Transactions of the Linnean Society, as well as his work on the unpublished plants of Guiana in fifty folio plates; in all of which, the magnified parts of fructification, so difficult to be developed from dried specimens, are drawn with the utmost precision and accuracy, by which she obtained a perfect knowledge of the admirable and wonderful formation of flowers and of the physiology of vegetation.

Her labours in the science of botany were duly appreciated on the continent, by her name being given, (in compliment to the excellence of her drawings,) to a species of the Genus Nymphaea or Water Lilly, by Dr. G. F. W. Meyer, of Gottingen, in his elegant work on the new plants of Essequiboe, wherein he has justly distinguished her abilities by classing her with those celebrated botanists, Mrs. Elizabeth Blackwell, Misses Lawrance and Hutchins, and Mrs. Dawson Turner and her two daughters Maria and Elizabeth, who have embellished the various botanical works of their relatives with their drawings... She also illustrated with her drawings, both her husband's and eldest son's communications to the Society of Antiquaries in the Archaeologia, vol.