Art of botanical illustration

THE ART OF

BOTANICAL ILLUSTRATION

WILFRID BLUNT WILLIAM T. STEARN

Introduction

Buchnera bipinnata and B. multifida by Athanasio Echeverria, c.1786-1803

hoped to be able to add, in a second bibliography, details of the more important illustrated flower books. When I had noted some eight hundred of them, and found my list still growing daily, I realised the impossibility of publishing a comprehensive bibliography in the space at my disposal and have therefore included in its place a more concise guide to illustrated works on British plants.

In many instances I have given several illustrations of the same flower; this has been done deliberately, so that the reader may see how artists of different periods have tackled the same problem. I have not thought it necessary to state the exact dimensions of the drawings and engravings reproduced; but often — and especially where very considerable reduction is involved — I have given in the text some indication of the original size.

To avoid any misunderstanding I must emphasise the limited aim of this book which is to present a general survey of the history of botanical illustration; it accordingly makes no attempt to deal in an encyclopaedic manner

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with every draughtsman who has made meritorious illustrations of plants, and there are necessarily various artists omitted, e.g. Joseph Seboth (d.1877) and William Henry Harvey (1811-66) whose claims equal those of many who have been included.

W.B. Baldwin’s Shore, Eton July 1949

Colour Plate 4. Buchnera bipinnata and B. multifida.

Water-colour drawing by Athanasio Echeverria, c.1786-1803. Torner Collection, Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA Colour Plate 5. Mourning iris (Iris susiana) right, and English iris (Iris xiphioides) left. Gouache by G.D. Ehret, 1745. Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

Introduction

Mourning iris (Iris susiana) right, and English iris (Iris xiphioides) left, by G.D. Ehret

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Some Botanical Books of the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

third and last part being completed and published after his death by Jacob Bobart the Younger. Many of its illustrations are drawn and engraved by Michael Burghers, a Dutchman who settled in Oxford and was well known for his engravings of architectural subjects. The plates which he made for Morison contain many small figures crowded upon a page — a rather disagreeable economy; but those of Gramineæ are finely engraved and well worth study.

The German-born botanist Johann Jakob Dillenius (1687-1747), who spent most of his life in this country and became the first Sherardian Professor at Oxford, himself drew and etched the figures for his Hortus Elthamensis (1732) and Historia Muscorum (1741). The former is an illustrated catalogue of exotic and newlyintroduced plants growing in the gardens of James Sherard at Eltham, the latter an important monograph on mosses. In his preface to the Hortus Elthamensis the author writes: “The figures, except where otherwise indicated, are all drawn from life and to the natural size. Let those who know the plants, and are not

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ignorant of pictorial art, be their judge; for my own part I am satisfied that I have taken every care to make them accurate, and when I was certain that they were correctly drawn, I was prepared to undertake the work of engraving, however tedious, so that they might be accurately printed.” That Dillenius took such pains over the accuracy of his plates has indeed been fortunate for later botanists. Linnæus based many of his names on Dillenius’s work,

Plate 39. Cowslip (Primula veris). Hand-coloured engravings by Elizabeth Blackwell, from her A Curious Herbal (1737-30) Plate 40. Geranium. (Pelargonium zonale). Part of watercolour drawing by Jan Moninckx, c.1690. Hortus Botanicus, Amsterdam Colour Plate 41. November flowers. Coloured engraving of water-colour drawing by Pieter Casteels for R. Furber, The twelve Months of Flowers (1730). Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

Some Botanical Books of the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

November flowers by Pieter Casteels

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Some Botanical Books of the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

which remains of permanent value for the interpretation of some Linnæan species. This is particularly true of his illustrations of mesembryanthemums. As an artist, Dillenius must be rated an unusually gifted amateur: in his Hortus, a comparison of his own engraving of a yucca (Pl. 323) with that of another yucca made by a professional German engraver (Pl. 324) clearly shows the limitations of an amateur technique.

A copy of the book coloured by Dillenius himself was bequeathed by him to the Bodleian Library; another with authentic colouring is in the Natural History Museum.

With Mrs. Elizabeth Blackwell, artist and engraver of A Curious Herbal (1737-39), we

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become entangled in a little drama of heroism, intrigue and torture which seems strangely out of place in the sober chronicles of botanical illustration. Dr. Alexander Blackwell, Elizabeth’s husband, had abandoned medicine and was on the way to becoming a successful printer, when his prospects were suddenly blighted by a combination of London printers who resented the fact that he had never been apprenticed to the trade. Condemned to a debtors’ prison, Alexander might have languished there indefinitely had not his wife gallantly come to the rescue. Learning from Sir Hans Sloane that a herbal of medicinal plans was needed, she took a lodging near the Chelsea Physic Garden and set about making the drawings and engravings which have made her famous. From his prison cell Alexander assisted with the text; and so successful was their joint venture that two years later he was released.

It would be pleasant to be able to relate that the re-united pair lived happily ever after. For a time, indeed, all went well: we find Alexander acting as agent to the Duke of Chandos, and compiling a work on A New Method of improving Cold, Wet, and Clayey Grounds; then he turns up in Sweden, dividing his attention between agriculture and quack medicine. But eventually he became involved in a conspiracy to alter the Swedish succession. He was arrested, charged with treason, and condemned to be variously tortured and then broken alive on the wheel, a sentence which was finally commuted to one of decapitation. He remained in good spirits to the last: on the scaffold, “having laid his head wrong, he remarked jocosely, that being his first experiment, no wonder that he should want a little instruction.”

Figure 47. Pasque-flower (Pulsatilla patens). Engraving from Breyne, Exoticarum… Centuria Prima (1678-89) Colour Plate 42. Willow-herb (Epilobium angustifolium), evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) and purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria var.). Colour mezzotint from J.W. Weinmann, Phytanthoza Iconographia vol. 3 (1742). Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Some Botanical Books of the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Willow-herb (Epilobium angustifolium), evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) and purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria var.) by J.W. Weinmann

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The Age of Ehret

Magnolia grandiflora by G.D. Ehret

At Basel he spent a year helping a certain Samuel Burckhardt to lay out a new garden, and met again his old friend the Margrave of Baden-Durlach who had been driven from his country by the invading French. Armed with letters of introduction from Burckhardt and a passport from the governor of Strasbourg, he next set out for Paris, stopping on the way at Bern, Lausanne, Geneva, Lyons and Montpellier. The latter town was in the grip of a heat wave, and the gardens so parched that Trew only received three paintings from there; but he tells us that the artist’s technique had greatly improved. After botanising in Auvergne, Ehret continued on his way to Paris, often travelling on foot and

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alone. This solitude must have been of his own choosing, for we can clearly see from his pages how readily he made friends when he wished to do so.

Bernard de Jussieu, to whom Ehret bore a letter of introduction, received the young German kindly and fixed up a room for him in his garden-house. But the artist was anxious not to be a burden to his host. It had been his intention to proceed to Holland, and he wanted to be on his way; at Jussieu’s suggestion, however, he went first to England, the proud bearer of a passport signed by Louis XV himself and of a dozen letters of introduction.

In London he met Sir Hans Sloane and Philip Miller1 whose sister-in-law he was later to marry, and made a large number of drawings, two hundred of which were sent to Trew. But Holland still called him, and the following year (1736) we find him in Leiden.

Linnæus2 was at this time staying with the wealthy Anglo-Dutch banker and gardenlover George Clifford (1685-1760) near Haarlem, and Ehret tramped on foot from Leiden to meet the young Swedish botanist.

“Linnæus and I were the best of friends,” he wrote; “he showed me his new method of examining the stamens, which I easily understood, and privately resolved to bring out a Tabella of it…With this Tabella I earned some money; for I sold it at 2 Dutch gulden apiece, and almost all the botanists of Holland bought it of me.” Nevertheless only two copies are known to have survived (Calmann, 1977). It was republished, without acknowledgment of Ehret’s authorship, in Linnæus’s Genera Plantarum (Leiden, 1737); “when Linnæus was a beginner,” noted

Colour Plate 44. Magnolia grandiflora. Coloured engraving of water-colour drawing by G.D. Ehret, 1743 Colour Plate 45. Ketmia (Pentapetes phoenicea). Gouache by G.D. Ehret. Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

The Age of Ehret

Ketmia (Pentapetes phoenicea) by G.D. Ehret

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West and East

A

handmaid to supply his needs. Flowers, birds and other animals, just as the mountains, the sea and the sky, are to him a background to human events, created for his enjoyment and deserving of no consideration when they cease to serve or distract him. He plucks the bluebells by armfuls, wedges them into hideous vases, leaves the water unchanged, and ultimately discards them without a tear. In picking them he gratifies little but the collector’s instinct; in crowding them together he illustrates a misconception prevalent in the West that twenty flowers in a pot are twice as beautiful as ten.

All such generalisations are dangerous: we could find plenty of exceptions to such arrogance in the West, and no doubt plenty of examples of it in the East. But the fact remains that, from the earliest times, the Far Eastern tradition bears witness to what Laurence Binyon5 calls an “exquisite courtesy to Nature”.

This attitude is fostered by Taoism: “Flowers especially”, says Binyon, “seemed, to those

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B

imbued with Taoist conceptions, to partake of an ideal existence. Their sensitiveness and vigour alike, the singleness of purpose in their expansion to the light, their bountiful exhalation of their sweetness, their sacrifice, their beauty, all made a particular appeal.”

From China, this sense of man’s intimate relationship with all nature spread to Japan.

There is a well-known Japanese poem which tells of a girl who went to draw water from a well, but, finding that during the night a morning glory had twined itself round the rope, came away, her pitcher empty, to seek “gift water” instead.

Figure 48. (a) Epimedium grandiflorum. Woodcut from Mitsufusa Shimada and Ono Ranzan, Ka-i, 1759 (b) Japanese lily of the valley (Convallaria majalis var. keiskei). Woodcut from Iinuma, Somoku-dzusetsu, 1856 Colour Plate 53. Aconitum falconeri. Water-colour drawing by Vishnupersaud, Indian artist, early nineteenth century. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

West and East

Aconitum falconeri by Vishnupersaud

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The Age of Redouté

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Christmas rose (Helleborus niger) by Pierre Turpin

Bee orchid (Ophrys apifera) by Pierre Turpin

printers, made it possible for him to produce illustrated books which have few rivals in the whole history of botanical art. The debt Redouté owed to the skilful engravers who converted his paintings triumphantly into magnificent prints is easily overlooked. It is fortunate that so much of his time and talent was devoted to the faithful portrayal of living succulent plants and petaloid monocotyledons, “liliacées”, which lose so many of their characters when dried as herbarium specimens.

Stipple engraving was developed in France during the eighteenth century, and exploited with great success by Bartolozzi and Ryland in England, where Redouté became acquainted with its possibilities. The process is simply that of etching by dots rather than by lines, the plate

being often also worked upon with the bare needle or with the roulette; it was admirably suited to give delicate gradations of tone and

Colour Plate 62. Christmas rose (Helleborus niger).

Water-colour drawing by Pierre Turpin (1775-1840).

Royal Horticultural Society, Lindley Library Colour Plate 63. Bee orchid (Ophrys apifera). Watercolour drawing by Pierre Turpin (1775-1840). Royal Horticultural Society, Lindley Library Colour Plate 64. Yellow ladyslipper orchid (Cypripedium calceolus var. pubescens). Water-colour drawing by Pancrace Bessa (1772-1835). Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

The Age of RedoutĂŠ

Yellow ladyslipper orchid (Cypripedium calceolus var. pubescens) by Pancrace Bessa

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Thornton and the Temple of Flora

Blue Egyptian waterlily (Nymphaea caerulea) (colour print from water-colour drawing by Peter Henderson)

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Thornton and the Temple of Flora

“Large Flowering Sensitive Plant� (Calliandra grandiflora) (colour print from oil painting by Philip Reinagle)

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Walter Fitch: The Age of the Lithograph

Rhododendron edgeworthii by W.H. Fitch

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Walter Fitch: The Age of the Lithograph

Rhododendron salignum and Rh. eleagnoides by W.H. Fitch

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Walter Fitch: The Age of the Lithograph

Fitch had a marvellous power of visualising plants as they lived and of retaining their image in his memory.

This emboldened him rather to treat his originals as sketches than to work them into finished pictures, with the result that when finally drawn on stone they underwent a certain generalisation in which the type of the species came to life and took the place of a photographically true portrait. His colouring was equally bold, which must have been a veritable boon to the colourists, who could mostly get the desired effect with simple washes.

His virtuosity is almost incredible. Moreover, though his draughtsmanship is impeccable, most of his work lacks sensibility — an imperfection which is far less engaging. His contours, drawn as they often are with a pen and lithographic ink, are too rigid to blend with the texture of the chalk shading; and when towards the end of his life, in making his lily drawings for Elwes, he worked with chalk only, his line became altogether too swift and too loose. But, all things considered, Fitch remains the most outstanding botanical artist of his day in Europe. He was the first draughtsman to produce really satisfactory drawings from dried herbarium specimens, giving them a semblance of the life they had when growing, and for this alone botanists in England would remain for ever in his debt. He was always his own lithographer, and became a skilled exponent of the art; but he never entirely mastered Gauci’s knack of achieving precision without losing sensitiveness of outline.

Otto Stapf ’s excellent summary of Fitch’s method is worth quoting:

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W.B. Hemsley, in the Kew Bulletin (1915), gives us a vivid little sketch of Fitch at work upon the drawings for Elwes’s Monograph of the genus Lilium (see Colour Plate 99). Though well over sixty, the artist drew direct upon the stone “without hesitation, and with a rapidity and dexterity that was simply marvellous.” That he also made preliminary sketches for these lithographs is known, for a large collection of them, presented by Miss Snelling, is in the Kew Herbarium. Fitch has left us, in a series of articles published in the Gardeners’ Chronicle (1869),3 some valuable notes on the technique of botanical drawing which throw some light on his own method of work. Much of what he says is offered in the form of “tips” to the beginner: if the leaves to be drawn are erect in relation to the stem, sketch the lower ones first; if they are reflexed, begin with the upper ones; if they are serrated, put in the serrations before the veining; if they

Figure 53. Victoria amazonica. Part of underside of leaf showing the architecture of the veining which inspired Joseph Paxton when designing the Crystal Palace.

Lithograph by W.H. Fitch from W.J. Hooker, Victoria regia (1851) Colour plate 98. Lilium speciosum. Coloured lithograph

by W.H. Fitch for H.J. Elwes, Monograph of the Genus Lilium (1871-80). Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

Walter Fitch: The Age of the Lithograph

Lilium speciosum by W.H. Fitch

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The Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Angel’s trumpet (Brugmansia arborea syn. Datura arborea) by Marianne North

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The Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Waratah (Telopea speciosissima) by Marianne North

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The Twentieth Century

Tulip-tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) by Jenny Brasier

Leighton (1898-1989; see Figure 62), Miss Agnes Miller Parker, Mrs. Gertrude Hermes and other wood engravers have made plates, including many of flowers, for a variety of books dealing with the British countryside.

Neat pen-and-ink drawings (see Figure 63) by the author are reproduced side by side with early woodcuts in R.G. Hatton’s The Craftsman’s Plant-Book (1909). Etching has been employed

by Mrs. Blanche Ames to illustrate Prof. Oakes Ames’s Orchidaceae (Boston, 1905-22). The art lithograph has also been revived to some effect; in conjunction with colour it has been

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employed by John Farleigh to illustrate Sacheverell Sitwell’s Old Fashioned Flowers (1939), and by John Nash for his own English Garden Flowers (1948).

Colour Plate 112. Tulip-tree (Liriodendron tulipifera).

Water-colour drawing by Jenny Brasier (b.1936). Private collection Colour Plate 113. Magnolia campbellii. Water-colour drawing by Jeanne Holgate (b.1920). Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

The Twentieth Century

Magnolia campbellii by Jeanne Holgate

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ISBN: 978-1-85149-760-7

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