The

ofGolden Age

BOTANICALART

Author’s Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the staff of the Library, Art and Archives at The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew for their help with the illustrations; Gina Fullerlove, Head of Kew Publishing for her advice, and Alison Rix for her help with research and assistance throughout the project.

THIS IS AN ANDRE DEUTSCH BOOK

Text © Martyn Rix 2012Design © Andre Deutsch Books Limited 2012All images unless otherwise stated in the Picture Credits on page 256 © The Board and Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

The right of Martyn Rix to be identifed as the author of work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This edition published in 2012 by Andre DeutschA division of the Carlton Publishing Group20 Mortimer StreetLondonW1T 3JW

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of cover or binding other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition, being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser.

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A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978 0 233 00364 1

OPPOSITE: Bombax pentandrum (now Bombax ceiba) by General J Eyre.

PREVIOUS PAGE: Rosa pimpinellifolia flore variegato by Pierre-Joseph Redouté from Les Roses.

LEFT: Yellow horned poppy, Chelidonium pedunculis unifloris … (now Glaucium flavum) by Georg Dionysius Ehret.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

MARTYN RIX

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Introduction ...............................................................................................8

1 The Origins of Botanical Art .............................................................. 10 Leonardo da Vinci .............................................................................. 202 Early Works of the Sixteenth Century ................................................ 22 Jacopo Ligozzi .................................................................................. 323 Seventeenth-Century Florilegia .......................................................... 34 Dutch Flower Paintings ...................................................................... 464 North American Plants ....................................................................... 48 Linnaeus and Plant Classification ...................................................... 605 Travellers to the Levant ..................................................................... 62 Maria Sybilla Merian .......................................................................... 746 The Exploration of Russia and Japan ................................................. 76 Les Vélins du Muséum ....................................................................... 867 Botany Bay and Beyond ..................................................................... 88 Sir Joseph Banks ................................................................................ 988 The Golden Age in England ............................................................. 100 Mrs Delany and her Paper Mosaicks ................................................. 1129 South American Adventures ............................................................. 114 Thornton’s The Temple of Flora, or Garden of Nature ...................... 12610 The Golden Age in France ................................................................ 128 Empress Joséphine ........................................................................... 14411 Botanical and Horticultural Illustrated Journals ............................... 146 Henry C. Andrews ............................................................................ 15612 Early Chinese Plant Drawings .......................................................... 158 Père David and the French Missionaries ........................................... 16813 The Company School in India .......................................................... 170 The Story of Flora Danica 1761–1883 ............................................. 18614 A New Era at Kew ........................................................................... 188 George Maw ..................................................................................... 20415 Victorian Travellers .......................................................................... 206 Elwes and the Genus Lilium ............................................................ 21616 Bringing China to Europe................................................................. 218 Modern Florilegia ............................................................................. 22817 The Flowers of War and Beyond ....................................................... 230 Exhibiting Botanical Watercolours ................................................... 24018 Carrying on the Tradition ................................................................. 242

Index ...................................................................................................... 250Bibliography ........................................................................................... 255Publishers’ Credits .................................................................................. 256

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OPPOSITE: Heliconia “uaupensis”, an unamed species, by Margaret Mee.

FOLLOWING PAGES: Victoria amazonica from Lindley’s Victoria Regia.

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drawings of the New Zealand genus Dacrydium, done by Sidney Parkinson during his voyage with Banks and Captain James Cook many years earlier. Lambert was, like Banks, a keen botanist of independent means, and had met John Sibthorp while at Oxford. He formed a private herbarium, containing around 30,000 specimens, which he housed at his home, Boyton House, near Heytesbury in Wiltshire, and to which he regularly welcomed members of the scientific establishment.

Francis Bauer worked with another influential figure, John Lindley (1799–1865), a keen gardener, who had a particular passion for orchids. An eminent and industrious man, Lindley had been brought up among plants, his father being a nurseryman and pomologist in Norfolk. Lindley was an artist, as well as being a prolific author, university professor, editor of The Botanical Register, and, for many years, administrator of the Horticultural Society of London. Lindley, alongside his contemporaries Darwin, Paxton and William Jackson Hooker, was one of the great Victorian biologists, and started his working life alongside the botanist Robert Brown at Sir Joseph Banks’s herbarium and library in Soho Square. Here Lindley specialized in the study of roses and in 1820 published Rosarum Monographia; or a botanical history of roses, with descriptions of 76 species and 19 engraved plates, of which 18 were drawn by himself, and one by John Curtis. When Banks died in the same year, Lindley was employed by a merchant with many useful business contacts, named William Cattley. Cattley was a keen grower of orchids and employed Lindley to study these amazing plants; Lindley reciprocated by naming a genus of orchids Cattleya.

In 1822, Lindley was appointed assistant secretary at the Horticultural Society’s garden at Chiswick, where he remained for the rest of his working life. Lindley was responsible for the numerous new plants and seeds flooding in from the plant collectors sent abroad by Banks and others, and also held the post of Professor of Botany at London University. He died in 1865, and is commemorated by the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley medal, and the RHS Lindley Library, the nucleus of which was Lindley’s own library. Among the publications associated with Lindley are the Illustrations of orchidaceous plants, by Francis Bauer…With notes and prefatory remarks by John Lindley, containing 35 lithographed folio plates, and published in two parts in 1830 and 1838; The Genera and Species of Orchidaceous Plants (1830–40) and Collecteana Botanica, published in 1821 and containing “figures and botanical illustrations of rare and curious exotic plants, chiefly cultivated in the gardens of Great Britain”. The plates for this were contributed by Ferdinand Bauer, and others, including William Hooker and William Jackson Hooker. These two were not related; the first a skilful painter, particularly of fruit, who made many paintings for the Horticultural Society, is remembered in the pigment

LEFT: The underside of a lily pad of Victoria amazonica from Lindley’s Victoria Regia.

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Les Roses, Redouté undertook other work, and collaborated with, among others, the father and son André and François Michaux (see page 55) in their publications on the trees of North America.

Life now became more difficult for Redouté. In 1822, his younger daughter Adelaide, a promising flower painter, died, as did his friend and teacher, Gerard van Spaëndonck, who had been probably the greatest artistic influence in his career. Van Spaëndonck’s death, however, conveniently resulted in a vacancy at the Jardin des Plantes, and Redouté was appointed as one of two Maîtres de dessin au Muséum d’Histoire naturelle. His work included teaching flower painting to amateurs, as well as the art of botanical illustration to more serious students, and he was also responsible for maintaining, and adding to, the collection of vélins.

When Louis XVIII died in 1824, his brother, Charles X, ascended the throne, becoming the last Bourbon King of France and ruling until his abdication in 1830. Charles recognized Redouté’s exceptional talent, investing him as a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. Redouté had become friendly with the King’s daughter-in-law, the Duchesse de Berry, who was a pupil and supporter of Pancrace Bessa (see page 136). In 1824, Redouté dedicated his Album de Redouté, a selection of paintings from Les Roses and Les Liliacées, to her, and this led indirectly to the purchase for her, by her father-in-law, in 1828, of the original watercolours for Les Roses.

Redouté, by now financially straitened, also attempted to generate some income by producing a smaller and more popular work between 1827 and 1833, under the title of Choix des plus belles fleurs. This contains pictures of popular garden flowers, and is interesting as a record of what was cultivated at the time, and the state of development of some flowers such as pansies and sweet peas.

On the resignation of Charles X in 1830, Louis Philippe, Duc d’Orleans, succeeded to the throne, and by a twist of fate, Redouté’s career came full circle with his appointment to the Queen, Marie-Amelie, as Peintre de Fleurs du Cabinet de la Reine, a position he had previously held under Marie-Antoinette. Without this support, Redouté, who seems to have had little business acumen, would almost certainly have become bankrupt. As it was, he continued to paint until the penultimate day of his life, which ended suddenly on 19 June 1840, leaving a truly great legacy of flower paintings.

RIGHT: “Dahlia double” by Pierre-Joseph Redouté from Choix des plus belles fleurs.

OPPOSITE: Various auriculas by Pierre-Joseph Redouté from Choix des plus belles fleurs.

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parisienne, contenant la description des plantes qui croissent naturellement aux environs de Paris, which was published in eight parts, between 1808–1813, but never completed. In 1815, Poiteau worked at Versailles, with its famous collection of citrus trees, and in 1818 he illustrated the Histoire naturelle des orangers, dedicated to the ubiquitous Duchesse du Berry, with text by the naturalist Antoine Risso. Later that year, he travelled to French Guiana, and on his return in 1822 he moved to work at the chateau of Fontainebleau.

Meanwhile, between 1808 and 1835 Turpin and Poiteau had collaborated on another project, this time in the form of a fine, new, and greatly enlarged, edition of Duhamel du Monceau’s Traité des arbres fruitiers, Poiteau following this with another book on fruit, La Pomologie française, in 1846, and in 1848 and 1853 two volumes of a practical work on horticulture entitled Cours d’horticulture. The collaboration between these two fine artists ended with Turpin’s death in 1840, the same year in which Redouté died.

LEFT: Studies of an apricot, its flowers and fruit by Pierre Antoine Poiteau from La Pomologie française.

OPPOSITE: A study of tulips made in 1839 by Félice Cronier who was heavily influenced by Redouté’s style.