Celebrating Native Trees: Botanical Portraits

Widely admired for its elegant blend of art and science, botanical illustration and art has had a resurgence in recent years. The purpose of botanical illustration is to assist in identifying plants. An accurate botanical rendition can depict more detail with more precision than a photograph. Beyond the practical, botanical illustration and art (which may focus more on aesthetics than science) reveals the beauty and mystery of the natural world. The more the artist and viewer looks and observes, the more the wonder of plants is revealed.

​

One of the earliest uses of botanical illustration was to identify plants with medicinal properties. Drawings were gathered in books called herbals and were used by physicians in plant-based medicine. Herbals were among the first literature produced in ancient Egypt, China, India, and Europe. The first known herbal, De Materia Medica, was written by a Greek military physician, Pedanius Dioscorides, in the first century and remained the authority until the Renaissance with the rise of modern science.

​

Botanical drawings were also essential in the Age of Discovery (1450 – 1650). On long voyages to far corners of the world, thousands of plant and seed samples were collected and cataloged. Artists often joined these expeditions and recorded what was found. One artist explorer was Maria Sibylla Merian (1647 - 1717), who packed up her daughters and sailed from Germany to Surinam where she lived and worked for two years.  One of her major contributions was to associate plants with their pollinators.

 

Landowners cultivated the “new” and exotic plants for their garden estates, and some commissioned botanical artists to catalog their prized collections in florilegia—lavish illustrated plant and flower anthologies. Pierre Joseph Redouté (1759–1840), the most recognized botanical artist of all time, was commissioned by Napoleon’s wife, Empress Josephine to record her gardens at Malmaison.  Redouté produced almost 500 watercolors, and several were published as a book, Les Liliacees.

​

As printing technologies were refined, from woodcuts to engravings and then lithography, plant knowledge through books and magazines became more widely available. In England, gardening became a national obsession with a lively trade between the British and the American colonies.

​

During the 19th century, botanical art became prized as a "female accomplishment," for the "cultured class," like music or needlework. Beatrix Potter, famous for her Tales of Peter Rabbit, had serious scientific and artistic interests in natural history, particularly in fungi and mosses.

​

For the past two hundred years, the center of plant science, conservation, and botanical illustration has been the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, near London, England. Since their early eighteenth century origins, Kew's gardens have spread to 300 acres and their living collection of plants is the largest in the world, with representatives of about one in eight plant species.

​

In North America, the hub for botanical art and illustration is the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, housed on the 5th floor of the Hunt Library at Carnegie Mellon University. The American Society of Botanical Artists (ASBA) holds its international conference every three years in Pittsburgh, and was held this year October 13 - 15. The Hunt Institute hosts the ASBA's international exhibition, which is open to the public  through December 15, 2016 and features 43 artists representing 15 countries.

 

Sources & References: American Society of Botanical Artists; Botanical Artists of Canada ; Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation; Flora Mirabilis by Catherine Howell, published by National Geographic and Missouri Botanical Garden (2009). A fascinating source for botanical history are books by Andrea Wulf, including Brother Gardeners, Founding Gardeners, and The Invention of Nature.