Collection Selection Boxes – Botanical Illustration

Unknown maker

Chicory, Cichorium intybus L.

This and the following design are gouache studies painted on vellum, and are probably pages from a manuscript herbal. We know that the pages were once part of a bound volume because three of the four edges of the sheets have been gilded. The textile designer James Mitten (1812 – 54) once owned these drawings in the early 19th century. He probably used them as source material when designing floral and foliage patterns.

Herbals were concerned with how plants could be used medicinally rather than how they could be identified and the illustrations were secondary to the authoritative text.

Basil Besler (1561 – 1629)

Hyacinthus Anglic, Cinericeus; Palma Christi maculata; Hyacinthus Comosus spurius; Dracunculus Aquatilis

This is a plate from a magnificent florilegium (a decorative flower book) known as the Hortus Eystettensis. The work contains 374 plates illustrating more than 1,000 flowering plants in the gardens of the Prince Bishop of Eichstätt. Besler managed the project over a period of 16 years. The illustrations are notable for their elegant design and decorative layout. Each plant is shown with its roots as was conventional in botanical illustration at the time. The plants are illustrated in order according to their season of flowering.

Correspondence surrounding the book’s production shows that it was designed to be coloured, and a number of variant hand-coloured copies survive. An intact ‘white’ (uncoloured) edition of the

Hortus Eystettensis is in the National Art Library at the V&A. As the first of its kind, this book triggered a rush of similar books commissioned by the owners of notable gardens for their personal delight and as a way of showing others that they had the means to cultivate such outstanding plant collections. Because these books were produced primarily as celebrations of ownership, they rarely contained any useful text. Nevertheless, they did provide botanists with a record of the new and exotic species arriving in Europe from abroad and were also useful to designers as a pattern source.

Jacques Le Moyne De Morgues (1533? – 88)

Wild Strawberry and Female Emperor Moth, Fragaria vesca L. and Saturnia pavonia

Whilst some of Le Moyne’s drawings are derived from the generalised illustrations of earlier books, others show him working directly from nature, including all the imperfections and particularities of individual specimens. With its mouth- wateringly realistic berries but strangely stiff stems this drawing of a wild strawberry lies somewhere in between the two modes: though it shows a familiarity with the living plant, the general outline has been copied from an earlier illustration by the botanist Leonhart Fuchs. The pinks and marigolds (in the following design), on the other hand, appear to have been drawn from nature.

The V&A holds 59 studies of fruit and flowers painted by French artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues. These drawings were probably intended to serve as a reference for designers and makers of jewellery, embroiderers or other craftsmen.

The watermark in the paper is the same as that used in Paris and Arras in 1568. It seems likely that the watercolours date from the period between 1568 and 1572, when Le Moyne fled to England with other Huguenots (French Protestants) to escape religious persecution in France.