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Flower Mystique: Botanical art from Elsie Mistie Sterling on exhibit at ASC June-September

Wildflower paintings created during a 7,500-mile, 14-year nomadic journey on foot through the South in the 1930s and ’40s will be on display in “Flower Mystique: The Botanical Art of Elsie Mistie Sterling” June-September at the Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas, 701 Main St., Pine Bluff.

Mystery, eccentricity and singleness of purpose describe the life of artist Elsie Mistie Sterling, the eldest of four daughters born in 1907 to immigrants from the Dalmatia region of Yugoslavia. Mistie Sterling’s Yugoslavian herbalist grandmother gave her a love of wildflowers and her love of art seemed to have been with her always, she once said. As a child growing up in Chicago, she took private art lessons and often visited the Chicago Art Institute.

But life took a strange turn when in 1928, Mistie Sterling married Dr. Richard Arthur Sterling, a German immigrant 30 years her senior. Dr. Sterling was a reputed vaudeville performer, movie producer and cameraman, motion picture color-process inventor and Johns Hopkins-trained physician although Johns Hopkins has no record of him.

The Great Depression left the couple penniless. They loaded their possessions into knapsacks and began their travels. During this odyssey Mistie Sterling became enchanted with the wildflowers she saw and began creating a series of drawings which she came to call “Portraits of the Wild Flowers of the Nation.”

The family, which by this time also included Mistie Sterling’s two sisters Pauline and Lottie, finally found a measure of business success – allowing them to purchase a car – with a city directory publishing company. They found the end of the road when they were stranded in Rogers, AR, a casualty of WWII gas and tire rationing.

In Rogers, Mistie Sterling began to support her family through commissions for her work which included work on furniture, jewelry design, buttons, dishes, oil landscapes and other art work. But she never forgot her wildflowers. Every Sunday the family drove out into the countryside so Mistie Sterling could paint. One of the sisters even photographed the specimens so Mistie Sterling could continue working after the season was over.

“We believe it was her willingness to take on anything that prepared her for the unsurpassed work in her wildflower collection,” sister Lottie once said. “These were her special love, almost a relaxation from the jobs she was commissioned to do.”

In the 1950s both Mistie Sterling and sister Pauline became ill. Dr. Sterling refused to let either see a doctor, preferring to treat them himself. In 1960 the women died within a month of each other, but not before Mistie Sterling made sister Lottie promise to care for Dr. Sterling which she did until his death in 1966 at age 91.

At this point the collection began its own nomadic travels as sister Lottie moved to Missouri in 1974, joined a religious commune and donated the paintings to the organization where the collection was appraised at the time for $58,000. Facing allegations that he conspired to murder his wife, the commune’s leader moved his ragtag group to Texas in 1979. Three months later the collection was abandoned at a Texas public library. After a few more stops along the way, the more than 450 paintings found a home in the permanent collection of the Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas.

Information for this article come from the records of the Arts & Science Center and from “Elsie Mistie Sterling (1907-1960): Arkansas Artist/Botanical Illustrator,” by Ellen C. Stern.

The center, located at 701 Main St. in Pine Bluff, is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, 1-4 p.m. Saturday and closed on Sunday. For more information, contact the center at (870) 536-3375 or visit the website at