Joy Adamson was a thoroughly modern woman even by today’s standards - in the middle of the last century she must have seemed absolutely alien. Born Austrian, as an aspiring sculptress, she met her first husband, a Jew. While traveling alone to Africa to find a place for them to live safe from Nazis, she met a botanist who soon became her second husband. She was his assistant in the African bush, painting hundreds of never before rendered birds and fauna in their natural habitat. The Royal Horticultural Society of Great Britain awarded her the Grenfell Gold Medal in 1947.
Then, swept off her feet by African game warden George Adamson, she married again. Her artistic talents continued to benefit the world as she painted hundreds of portraits of the native peoples, forever capturing in time their cultural dress and ethnic appearance. Her paintings were featured in the Nairobi National Museum in Kenya, but are currently on display in Cheltenham, England to raise money for the Elsa Conservation Trust.
Apparently, driven to further artistic endeavors, she wrote the all-time best-selling nature biography, “Born Free,” about the lioness cub her and George raised into adulthood then released into the wild to successfully raise its own family. She completed a trilogy of books about “Elsa” the lion, “Living Free” and “Forever Free,” before writing similar best-selling books about a cheetah, and finally a leopard.
Her house on Lake Naivasha in Kenya is named “Elsamere” after the famous lioness, and is a museum of accomplishment. You can visit, have an afternoon high tea and contemplate all the things this accomplished and driven artist did, and when she did them. If there ever was a woman to make a man feel inadequate – she’s the one.
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