Paul Furse
Royal Navy rear-admiral & Botanical Collector

John Paul Wellington Furse, (13 October 1904 – 8 October 1978) was an English naval officer who became a rear-admiral before he retired. He was a painter and botanical illustrator and later a plant hunter with his wife for the Royal Horticultural Society.
Family
John Paul Wellington Furse was born in Frimley, Surrey, England. He was the son of portrait painter Charles Wellington Furse and (a British nursing and military administrator) Dame Katharine Furse (formerly Katharine Symonds). His father died in the same week Furse was born. He had 4 uncles and 4 aunts. Including; Rev. Michael Bolton Furse (12 October 1870 – 18 June 1955), an Anglican bishop and Sir William Thomas Furse (21 April 1865 – 31 May 1953), an army lieutenant general.
His great-aunt was the botanical artist Marianne North (24 October 1830 – 30 August 1890).
As a child, Furse spent a lot of time in the Alps with his family.
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This entry incorporates text from “Paul Furse” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.