What Is Botanical Illustration? A Short History

Botanical illustration is the art of showing a plant's form, color and detail. Wikipedia's article on the subject says it is generally meant to be scientifically descriptive, and that it often goes with plant descriptions in books and journals. A good plate lets a reader identify a plant without seeing it.

That purpose explains the look. The drawings are exact, the plant is shown whole, and the page is usually clean. Those same traits make old plates easy to hang on a wall.

Early plant pictures

The earliest illustrated plant book the article cites is the Vienna Dioscurides, a copy of Dioscorides' De Materia Medica made in the year 512. Its pictures were not always accurate, and the article points out that this could be risky when people used plants as medicine. Medieval herbals such as the Pseudo-Apuleius Herbarius also carried stylized plant images, with manuscripts surviving from the 6th century.

Herbals and woodcuts

From 1530, printed herbals began to use woodcuts based on living plants. The article names Brunfels and Weiditz, whose work appeared between 1530 and 1537. Leonhart Fuchs's De historia stirpium of 1542 showed whole plants, with roots, flowers and fruit.

After 1564, copperplate engraving and etching allowed finer detail. Botany also became a science of its own, separate from herbal medicine, and the first botanical gardens and herbaria appeared.

Florilegia: books made to be admired

Not every plant book was for study. The article describes florilegia such as Hortus Eystettensis of 1613, which combined botanical subjects with decoration. The line between science and beauty has always been thin in this field, and many of the pictures in our shop sit on that line.

Ehret and Redouté

Georg Dionysius Ehret worked with Linnaeus on Hortus Cliffortianus in 1737. The article notes that he used many exploded details, small drawings that show parts of the flower taken apart.

Pierre-Joseph Redouté began as a botanical illustrator in 1784 and 1785, working on a book by L'Héritier. His major monographs included Les Liliacées, published from 1802 to 1816, and Les Roses, published from 1817 to 1824. Wikipedia's article on Redouté says he was born in 1759, became the official artist of Empress Joséphine, and painted plants in the garden at Malmaison. Many of his paintings were published as large colored stipple engravings.

You can see the rose plates in our rose collection and the lily plates in lilies, when images are available.

Color printing and lithography

Color printing developed in the 1700s, with the article crediting Le Blon and Gautier d'Agoty in 1767. Curtis's Botanical Magazine began in 1787 and became one of the longest-running botanical magazines.

Lithography, invented in 1796, became the usual printing method in the 1800s. Kew Gardens was founded in 1840, and the illustrator Walter Hood Fitch worked closely with its first director, William Jackson Hooker. Ferdinand Bauer illustrated Flora Graeca between 1806 and 1840.

Fruit paintings from the USDA

Not all plant art came from Europe. The USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection holds about 7,500 watercolors of fruit, made between 1886 and 1942, and most were painted between 1886 and 1916, according to Wikipedia's article on the collection. Around 60 artists contributed, and about one third of them were women. The three most prolific, Deborah Griscom Passmore, Amanda Almira Newton and Mary Daisy Arnold, each made more than 1,000 works.

These paintings were made to record varieties of fruit, so each one shows the shape, color and marks of a single type. Today they suit kitchens and dining rooms, and you can browse them in our fruit collection, including apples and lemons.

Different techniques

The article lists watercolor, gouache on vellum, oils, ink and pencil among the common media. Printing methods include woodcut, copperplate engraving, etching, stipple engraving, chromolithography and nature printing. The cyanotype plates of Anna Atkins date from 1843 to 1853.

When you browse our prints, you will see the results of these methods. Engravings have fine lines and sharp edges. Watercolors have soft color and visible brushwork. You can browse by style in antique botanical and watercolor botanical prints.

Botanical illustration and botanical art

The article draws a line between work made for science and work made purely for art, such as still lifes and florilegia. It does not give a formal definition of "botanical art," so the distinction is a matter of purpose. In practice, the terms overlap, and shoppers use them for the same kinds of pictures. A plate made for a flora can hang in a living room as well as a still life can.

Why these pictures work on a wall

Botanical plates give a room an orderly look. The plant is centered, the background is plain and the detail rewards a close look. A single large print can be a focal point, and several of the same style make a tidy set.

If you want to hang a group, our gallery wall layout guide explains how. For gifts, floral pictures also carry old associations, covered in the language of flowers.

Where our images come from

We print images from the National Gallery of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Each print page names its source. Read more on our sources page. We credit the collections as a matter of fact and do not suggest any partnership with them.

Sources

• Botanical illustration, Wikipedia: history, techniques, Ehret, Redouté, Bauer, Kew and printing methods.
• Pierre-Joseph Redouté, Wikipedia: birth year, Joséphine and Malmaison, and Les Roses.
• Pomological Watercolor Collection, Wikipedia: about 7,500 USDA watercolors made between 1886 and 1942.