Artefacts - Unearthing treasures from the Daniel Solander Library

A MOST EXACTING MAN

AMONG THE DANIEL SOLANDER LIBRARY’S MANY TREASURES ARE WORKS BY INNOVATIVE AUSTRIAN BOTANICAL ILLUSTRATOR, FERDINAND BAUER, WHO CIRCUMNAVIGATED AUSTRALIA WITH FLINDERS. MIGUEL GARCIA REPORTS.

As the youngest son of Lukas Bauer, court painter to the Prince of Liechtenstein, Ferdinand Bauer entered the world in January 1760 with art in his blood. Tragedy swiftly delivered him to the world of botanical science.

Just a year after he was born in the Austrian town of Feldsberg*, Bauer was orphaned, and along with his two brothers became wards of Father Norbertus Adamus Boccius, physician, botanist and prior of the local monastery.

The Bauer boys, under the tutelage of Boccius, became acute observers of nature. Then in 1780 Ferdinand and his brother Franz set out for Vienna, where Baron Nikolaus von Jacquin, Director of the Royal Botanical Garden at Schönbrunn Palace, put them to work illustrating his Icones Plantarum Rariorum, 1–3 (Vienna 1781–93).

Four years later, during a visit to Vienna, English botanist Dr John Sibthorp was so impressed by Ferdinand's work that he engaged him as a natural history painter for a journey around the Mediterranean. The expedition embarked in 1786 and by the time it arrived in England in December 1787 Bauer had produced more than 1,500 sketches of plants, animals, birds and landscapes. Many of the illustrations appeared in the Flora Graeca (London, 1806–40), a work lauded by Sir Joseph Hooker, who for more than 20 years was director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, as "the greatest botanical work that has ever appeared".

On a subsequent visit to London, Bauer met Sir Joseph Banks, who in 1800 secured him the post of botanical draughtsman on Matthew Flinders’ circumnavigation of Australia on the Investigator. Under the direction of botanist Robert Brown, Bauer honed his skills as a scientist, collecting specimens and crafting magnified drawings of dissected flowers and plant organs. Some of his most stunning depictions were of Western Australian species made at King George Sound and Lucky Bay between December and January 1801–1802.

‘Illustrationes was a commercial failure, abandoned after the publication of just 50 sets’

Bauer returned to England in late 1805 armed with an astonishing 2,073 drawings – more than 1,700 of them featuring plants from Australia, Norfolk Island, Timor and the Cape. He set his sights in the following years on producing Illustrationes Florae Novae Hollandiae. Unfortunately, his perfectionist standards undermined the project. His brother Franz, who served as botanical artist at Kew Gardens from 1790 to 1840, claimed that Ferdinand could find no-one capable of properly engraving or colouring the plates, forcing him to undertake every part of the work himself. In the end, despite his efforts, Illustrationes was a commercial failure, abandoned after the publication in 1813 of just 50 sets.

One of those extremely rare copies sits within the Daniel Solander Library’s collection. Uncoloured and clearly revealing the striking detail of Bauer’s illustrations, the publication was bequeathed by the Reverend William Woolls, who died at Burwood in 1893.

Woolls migrated to Sydney in 1832, aged just 16 years, from Winchester, England, and taught at private colleges before setting up his own school at Parramatta. A keen botanist, he delivered popular lectures on native flora, wrote papers for horticultural

Scarlet Banksia (Banksia coccinea) from the Library's Illustrationes Florae Novae Hollandiae

publications, and later earned a PhD for a dissertation on the botany of the Parramatta region. He is commemorated in the genus Woollsia (subfamily Epacridoideae) and in the names of six species.

As for Bauer, in 1814, disappointed at the failure of Illustrationes, he returned to Vienna and settled in a modest house near the Schönbrunn Botanical Garden. Before his death from dropsy in March 1826, he continued to paint, his work appearing in English publications such as Aylmer Bourke Lambert’s 'Description of the Genus Pinus’ and John Lindley’s ‘Digitalis’^ .

Despite attracting acclaim from contemporaries such as Banks and Flinders, Ferdinand was never immortalised by memorials. He is, however, mentioned in Franz's epitaph in St Anne's Chapel in Kew, which reads: “In the delineation of plants (Franz) united the accuracy of a profound naturalist with the skill of the accomplished artist, to a degree which has been only equalled by his brother Ferdinand.” His memory also lives on in the genus Bauera and Cape Bauer in South Australia.

*Now Valtice in the Czech Republic. ^The Daniel Solander Library collection includes both works. Doryanthes excelsa Chloanthes stoechadis