A Celebration Of Botanical Art

Throughout History – In Pictures

“A new book Plant: Exploring The Botanical World celebrates the beauty and diversity of plants from around the world across all media - from murals in

ancient Greece to a Napoleonic-era rose print and cutting-edge scans.”https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2016/oct/10/a-celebration-of-

botanical-art-throughout-history-in-pictures

Lilium chalcedonicum, c.1500 BC. Fresco, dimensions variable, Thera, Santorini

Swallows fly between long-stemmed red flowers (possiblyLilium chalcedonicum, the red lily of Greece) painted by an anonymous artist as part of a mural in a house built on the Greek island of Santorini during the Minoan age, some time before 1600 BC. That places them among the oldest pictures of recognizable plants currently known – they predate ancient Egyptian images of plants by around 300 years. They may mark the very beginning of botanical art – if only we could be certain what plants they show.Photograph: akg-images / De Agostini Picture/Phaidon

Rosa centifolia: Rosier a cent feuilles, 1820. Hand-coloured stipple engraving, 23 × 32 cm / 9 × 123⁄4 in Lindley Library, Royal Horticultural Society, London

This cabbage rose appeared in Les roses, a series of plates by renowned botanical artist Pierre-Joseph Redoute. On 2 December 1804 Napoleon Bonaparte crowned his wife, Josephine, Empress of the French in Paris. Four months later Josephine made Redoute ‘plant painter of her Majesty’, with a yearly salary of 18,000 francs, then a huge sum. Les Roses was not published until after her death in 1814.Photograph: The Art Archive/Phaidon

Large Flowering Sensitive Plant, from Robert John Thornton, The Temple of Flora, 1799. Hand-coloured engraving, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

A Jamaican man in the background gives an idea of the size of Calliandra grandiflora, a native of Central America whose reddish-purple stamens trail in tassels above its fine leaves. British artist Philip Reinagle was commissioned by botanist Thornton to illustrate the book – a tribute to the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who a few decades earlier had established the binomial system of naming plant and animal species, still used today.Photograph: Chronicle / Alamy/Phaidon

Opium poppies (Papaver somniferum), 18th-century album leaf, ink and colours on silk, National Palace Museum, Taipei

This delicate painting brings together Western artistic traditions – seen in the baroque shading and use of perspective – with Chinese taste, in the fringing of the petals and ‘true to nature’ curving stems. This is one of 16 paintings by Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione in the Album of Immortal Blossoms in an Everlasting Spring. Castiglione arrived in China in 1715. He adapted traditional Chinese art into what became known as the Sino-European or Chinese Palace style.Photograph: The Collection of Taiwan National Palace Museum/Phaidon

Page from Dara Shikoh Album, c.1633. Opaque watercolour and gold on paper, British Library, London

The iris in the bottom left of this miniature is easily recognizable, but the other flowers are too stylized to be identified precisely. The stylization reflects the painting’s twin influences, the Persian traditions of the artist (credited to be Mohammad Khan) and the European florilegia, or printed herbals, that inspired its balanced layout. The Dara Shikoh Album is named after the Mughal prince who collected its paintings and calligraphy as a gift for his future wife.Photograph: public domain / British Library/Phaidon

Various flowering plants, 1792. Pen and ink and watercolour on paper, 24 × 19.5 cm / 91⁄2 x 71⁄2 in Natural History Museum, London

This letter carries illustrations in watercolour documenting 10 plant species, including three species of the blood flower in the lower centre of the page: Haemanthus amarylloides, H. coccineus and H. pubescens. Dated 5 October 1792, it was sent by Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin, director of the botanic garden of Vienna University, to Swedish botanist Jonas Dryander, librarian to the famous naturalist Sir Joseph.Photograph: The Natural History Museum/Phaidon

Monkey bread (Adansonia digitata), from Florindie, ou histoire physico-economique des vegetaux de la Torride, 1789. Watercolour on manuscript, Service Historique de la Marine, Vincennes

The large fruits at the foot of this plate both whole and in cross section earn the baobab its colloquial name of ‘monkey bread’: rich in calcium, antioxidants and vitamin C, baobab powder is marketed today as a ‘superfood’. The plate was drawn by an accomplished amateur botanist, the French curate abbe Delahaye, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.Photograph: DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI/Phaidon

Peruvian daffodil (Pamianthe peruviana), 1933. Watercolour and pencil on paper, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London This illustration by Lilian Snelling demonstrates her remarkable skill for depicting delicate white flowers. For 30 years from 1922 Snelling was chief artist for Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, during which time she established a reputation as the most important British botanical artist of the era. This striking plant is now extinct in the wild owing to destruction of its habitat. It grows epiphytically, that is, it is supported non-parasitically by another plant.Photograph: The Board of Trustees - Royal Botanic Gardens/Phaidon

A Celebration Of Botanical Art

Throughout History – In Pictures