Flower Paintings From The Apothecaries' Garden: Contemporary Botanical Illustrations From Chelsea Ph
Gaspard Xenos
There are two Elizabeth Blackwells notable in the history of medicine, and both were British. Our story is about Elizabeth Blackwell, nee Simpson born in London on the 23rd April 1699, to Leonard and Alice Simpson of Poultry Street, London. Her father, Leonard was a painter who died when Elizabeth was very young. Like most young ladies of her time, she studied music, needlework, painting, and drawing. She had a penchant for flowers and would draw and paint in detailed precision. Little did Elizabeth know that in the not-too-distant future, her passion for plants would result in a masterpiece of botanical work.
Information regarding Elizabeth is sketchy, and for nearly three hundred years the same narrative has been inaccurately repeated. However, in 2017, things changed when Elizabeth Blackwell became the subject of a doctoral thesis by Janet Stiles Tyson, it is with this new knowledge that this article is written.
Flower Paintings from the Apothecaries' Garden: Contemporary Botanical Illustrations from Chelsea Ph
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It is at this point, that Elizabeth driven by monetary and marital problems, considered putting her artistic talent to good use, she planned to make a herbal book. Being of an astute character, and before embarking on the project, she sought advice from various botanists and herbalists, who advised her that pictures were not sufficient, and that she must include descriptive and explanatory notes.
I hope that she came to realise the historic nature of her project, and that through all her disappointments and sorrows, A Curious Herbal endowed her with the opportunities to develop her need to create, and that it strengthened her resilience. But did it distract her from grief, loss, humiliation?
It proved expensive and she resorted to one set of plants per week plus a page of description which she sold with a subscription, resulting in 4 accompanying illustrations over 125 weeks. The cost to subscribers was one shilling per set, 2 shillings per set if the plates were coloured by hand.
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Exhibition curated by PeterAsplin, Department of SpecialCollections. Revised version for the web edited by Julie Gardham, January 1999. Some of theopenings depicted here are not those exhibited in 1995, but arefrom the same works.
Most of the volumes displayed havebeen selected from the personal collections of William Hunter(1718-1783) and George Arnott Walker-Arnott (1799-1868). Howeverseveral are from strong holdings acquired by the Library tosupport the teaching of botany which has flourished in theUniversity since 1704.
Throughout the middle ages flowers had been depicted inmanuscript decoration. However, until the late fifteenth centurythey were usually stylised. This group (fol. 109v) bythe Master of the First Prayer Book of Maximilian displays aclear intention to represent living plants and includes Dianthus,Geranium, Iris, Rose, Sweet Pea and a double Daisy. It is one ofeight border panels decorated by the same hand as the LondonHastings Hours (British Library, MS Add. 54782).
The flower by an unknown artist depicted in the initial P(fol. 33) in this manuscript is clearly recognisable as Irisgermanica, grown in European gardens for centuries and portrayedthree and a quarter centuries later by Sydenham Edwards for CurtissBotanical magazine. Elsewhere in the volume carnations andstrawberries are reproduced with equal realism. Pier Andrea Mattioli, Commentarii, in librisex Pedacii Dioscoridis Anazarbei, De medica materia
Venice, 1554 SpColl f 313 (Walker-Arnott Collection) Page 332:Hyssopus Pier Andrea Mattioli (1501-1577) was born in Siena and broughtup in Venice. Like his father he practised as a physician, firstin Italy but then successively to Archduke Ferdinand and EmperorMaximilian II in Prague. The artists he employed for the woodcutsin his Commentarii further developed a contemporary trendtowards making full use of the area afforded by the block, withplants extending to its limits. Cross-hatching was used todisplay contours and varying thickness of line to indicate depth.Some coloured copies exist but these were published as black andwhite and then coloured by their owners. Mattioli died of theplague in Trent and the genus Matthiola was subsequently namedafter him. The Materia Medica of the Greek Dioscorides survivesin a manuscript of A.D. ca 512 - Codex VindobonensisDioscorides - which happens also to be the earliest illustratedherbal.
Emanuel Sweerts, Florilegium amplissimum etselectissimum .... 2 vols in 1
Amsterdam, 1620 X.1.12 (HunterianCollection)The introduction of engraving as a technique for bookillustration coincided with the proliferation of new plantarrivals in Europe from Turkey and the New World. A spate offlorilegia ensued, usually depicting the plants in anindividuals garden but there was much copying of otherartists work. That commissioned by Rudolf II of Austria ofEmanuel Sweerts, a Dutch natural history dealer, was among theearliest - completed in 1609 and originally published in 1612;the copy displayed is one of many reissues and the illustrationof fritillaries (pars 2, plate 7) demonstrates incidentally aninteresting example of a volume incompletely coloured by itsowner. Engraving permitted more accurate detail than woodcut,with hatching, stippling and white gaps to give athree-dimensional effect and simulate reflexion from shinyleaves. Sweerts and Johann Theodor de Bry were the first (whocopied whom is unclear) to establish the convention of portrayinglower stem with bulb or root alongside severed upper stem andflower in order to reproduce the plant life-size on the page.
Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) was educated in Germany. HerSwiss father, Matthias, was an engraver, while her maternalgrandfather was the Dutch botanical engraver Johann Theodor deBry and her art stems largely from the great flower painters ofseventeenth-century Holland. Her plants are drawn with care andexpertise and she succeeded in transmitting to her contemporariesthe exotic colours of tropical flowers and insects at a time whenthey were almost entirely unknown to Europeans. Her imaginationhad been fired by the great collection of insects of H. vanSommerdyck in Amsterdam. According to Goethe she was determinedto rival the exploits of the French naturalist Charles Plumierwho had visited the West Indies and in 1698 Maria and herdaughter Dorothea embarked for Surinam (Dutch Guiana) where theyspent two years collecting and painting insects and the plants onwhich they lived. However Marias first book, Der Raupenwunderbare Verwandlung, was confined to European species,such as Borago coerulea (T. 2, plate 32). It was subsequentlyexpanded in Dutch as Der rupsen begin, voedgel en wonderbaarevorandering (Amsterdam, 1683-1717). A Latin translation,Erucarum ortus: alimentum et paradosa metamorphosi, waspublished by Dorothea as a memorial in 1717.
Jan Commelin was director of the Amsterdam physic gardens. Hedied in 1698 and the second volume of Horti medici wascompleted by his nephew, Caspar Commelin. Most of the originalpaintings for the work were by Jan and Maria Moninckx. It istypical of many books describing gardens for plants imported toEuropean countries from their new colonies.
Christoph Jakob Trew, Plantae selectae.2 vols in 1
Nuremberg, 1750-1773 As.1.15 (HunterianCollection)Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708-1770) - one of the greatest ofeighteenth-century botanical artists - was the son of aHeidelberg market gardener who taught him to draw. After a spellin charge of one of the Electors gardens he started hispainting career under the Margrave of Baden at nearby Karlsruhe.He became acquainted with Christoph Jakob Trew, a wealthyNuremberg physician with an interest in botany, who commissionedhim to prepare illustrations for his Plantae selectaeduring travels through Switzerland, France, England and Hollandfrom 1732 onwards. At the same time he became acquainted withsome of the most influential botanists of his day, includingCarolus Linnaeus, Bertrand de Jussieu and Sir Hans Sloane. Heillustrated Hortus Cliffortianus for George Clifford, withwhom Linnaeus was staying at Hartekamp at the time ofEhrets visit. He married the sister-in-law of PhilipMiller, author of the monumental Gardeners dictionary,and in 1736 made England his permanent home. For a short time in1750 he was curator of Oxford Botanic Garden. He quickly became afavourite of the English aristocracy and was in much demand as atutor of flower painting. Many thousands of his drawings andpaintings, usually on vellum rather than paper, now survive inthe Victoria and Albert Museum, the Library of the RoyalBotanical Garden at Kew, the Natural History Museum, and the HuntBotanical Library. The genus Ehretia was named after him. He diedat Chelsea. Plantae selectae was issued in ten partscontaining in all a hundred engravings, including the splendidLilium Martagon canadense (plate 11). A further twenty plateswere included in a supplement, published 1790-1792, but over ahundred of Ehrets drawings for Trew were not published.
Botanical illustration is but one of many claims to fame ofJohn Lindley (1799-1865). Son of a Norfolk nurseryman, hedisplayed an interest in horticulture from an early age. By thetime he moved to London, aged 20, as library assistant to SirJoseph Banks, he had already translated and publishedLouis-Claude-Marie Richards Dmonstrations botaniques,ou, Analyse du fruit. Shortly afterwards he became assistantsecretary, then successively vice-secretary and secretary untilhis death, of the Horticultural Society, Professor of Botany atUniversity College from 1829 to 1860, and superintendant of theChelsea Physic Garden from 1836. He wrote several works onbotanical theory, promoting the natural system of classificationdeveloped by Jussieu and Candolle in opposition to the Linnaeansystem, as well as two major treatises on Orchidaceae and thereport that established Kew gardens as a national institution.From 1826 he was editor of the Botanical register but hadalready produced plates for it and as early as 1820 theHorticultural Society had commissioned him to draw roses andlarches. Morea herberti (fol. 949) from the garden of GeorgeHerbert probably originated in South America. No doubt because ofother pressures on Lindleys time, from 1831 the Botanicalregister and most of his own books were illustrated for himby Miss S.A. Drake.
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