Harriet L. Thompson — USDA Pomological Watercolors

14 restored plates, 1915, from the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection — with a biography from the archival record.

Harriet L. Thompson was a USDA botanical artist about whom almost nothing is recorded. White and Neumann’s 1982 survey of the collection, which names her among the illustrators most closely associated with it, notes only that she was born in Illinois and active in 1915; the Stuttgart Database of Scientific Illustrators records her employer as the Division of Pomology and her work as botanical and pomological drawing and watercolour painting, with no dates or places. No birth or death dates have been traced, and nothing is known of her training.

Her roughly two dozen watercolours in the Pomological Watercolor Collection are dated between June and September 1915 and are almost all stone fruit — plums and prunes, peaches, sweet cherries and a Japanese apricot — painted from specimens sent in by growers in California and New York, with a few apples. She signed her sheets “H. L. T.”.

The plates

Every plate in our restored set credited to Harriet L. Thompson, by fruit then variety. Each has its own anchor (for example #sharpe-apricot). This is our holding, not the painter’s complete output; the National Agricultural Library holds the rest.

Fruit	Variety	Year	Plate
Apricot	Sharpe	1915
Cherry	Florence	1915
Peach	Kent	1915
Peach	Lindley	1915
Peach	Mckevitts Cling	1915
Peach	Phillips Cling	1915
Peach	Tuscon	1915
Plum	Black Prince	1915
Plum	Champion	1915
Plum	Dorsett	1915
Plum	Late Orange	1915
Plum	Methley	1915
Plum	No. 50 Seedling	1915
Plum	Pasha	1915

By period

Plates per year (this set)

Sources & citation

• Harriet L. Thompson — Database of Scientific Illustrators 1450–1950, University of Stuttgart
• Harriet L. Thompson — Wikidata
• 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)
• The collection on Wikimedia Commons (files credited ‘Thompson, Harriet L.’)
• USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection — National Agricultural Library (the originals, with catalogue records)
• USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection — finding aid (NAL ArchivesSpace MS0184)

The original watercolours are in the public domain. The restorations shown here are Madten’s, at web resolution. To cite this page: Madten, “Harriet L. Thompson — USDA Pomological Watercolors,” https://www.madten.com/reference/harriet-l-thompson-usda-watercolors, 2026-10-29.