Elsie Lower Pomeroy — USDA Pomological Watercolors

27 restored plates, 1905–1912, from the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection — with a biography from the archival record.

Elsie E. Lower (1882–1971), later Elsie Lower Pomeroy, was born on 30 September 1882 in New Castle, Pennsylvania, the daughter of the Civil War Medal of Honor recipient Cyrus B. Lower, and grew up in Washington, D.C., where she graduated from the Corcoran School of Art. She joined the USDA’s Division of Pomology in the early 1900s — the Stuttgart illustrators’ database lists her as student assistant, clerk and artist from 1902 — and painted fruit for the department until about 1912, leaving after her 1911 marriage to the pomologist Carl Stone Pomeroy. More than 250 of her watercolours are in the Pomological Watercolor Collection, among them citrus, apples, strawberries and persimmons; several were reproduced in the 1908 and 1909 Yearbooks of Agriculture.

Unusually among the USDA artists she went on to an exhibiting career. In Riverside, California, where her husband worked at the Citrus Experiment Station, she studied with Millard Sheets and in 1937 painted a five-part watercolour series on the citrus industry; two sheets were shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1938 and one took an honourable mention at the California Water Color Society in 1939. She gave the series to the University of California, Riverside, in 1962, and died in Mill Valley, California, in 1971.

The plates

Every plate in our restored set credited to Elsie Lower Pomeroy, by fruit then variety. Each has its own anchor (for example #dona-maria-apple). This is our holding, not the painter’s complete output; the National Agricultural Library holds the rest.

Fruit	Variety	Year	Plate
Apple	Dona Maria	1911
Apple	Draper Best	1911
Apple	Mammoth Limbertwig	1905
Apple	Mcintosh	1908
Avocado	Chappelow	1906
Cherry	Napoleon	1907
Citrus	King	1911
Fig	Calimyrna	1912
Fig	Royal Black	1912
Gooseberry	Diploma	1909
Grape	Beclan	1907
Grape	Rose D'Italie	1910
Mango	Paheri	1910
Mango	Pere Louis	1910
Peach	Early Toledo	1910
Peach	Margaret	1908
Peach	Wager	1910
Pear	Dudley Houghton	1909
Pear	Giffard	1908
Persimmon	Hachiya	1909
Plum	Dorothy	1909
Plum	Kelsey	1911
Pomegranate	Sweet Green Skinned	1909
Strawberry	Almo	1909
Strawberry	Golden Gate	1910
Strawberry	Govenor Rollins	1910
Strawberry	Runnerless	1907

By period

Plates per year (this set)

Sources & citation

• UCR Magazine, Spring 2024, 'Bittersweet' (the Riverside citrus series)
• Elsie Lower Pomeroy — Wikipedia
• Elsie Lower Pomeroy — Database of Scientific Illustrators 1450–1950, University of Stuttgart
• Elsie E. Lower — Database of Scientific Illustrators 1450–1950, University of Stuttgart
• White, J. & Neumann, A. (1982), 'The collection of pomological watercolors at the U.S. National Arboretum', Huntia 4(2): 103–124 — Appendix I, 'Some U.S.D.A. artists'
• Pomological Watercolor Collection — Wikipedia (per-artist counts, citing the National Agricultural Library)
• Watercolor paintings by Elsie Lower Pomeroy — Wikimedia Commons (the NAL digitisation)
• USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection — National Agricultural Library (the originals, with catalogue records)
• USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection — finding aid (NAL ArchivesSpace MS0184)
• The collection on Wikimedia Commons

The original watercolours are in the public domain. The restorations shown here are Madten’s, at web resolution. To cite this page: Madten, “Elsie Lower Pomeroy — USDA Pomological Watercolors,” https://www.madten.com/reference/elsie-lower-pomeroy-usda-watercolors, 2026-10-29.