Collection: Botanical & Nature Illustration

Botanical and nature illustration is one of the longest continuous traditions in Western art. It runs from the herbal manuscripts of the late mediaeval period, through the great florilegia and natural history publications of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, to the field guides and lithographed plates of the nineteenth century. The work joins observation and design at a level of sustained accuracy that separates it from purely decorative flower painting.

The tradition took its first modern form in sixteenth century Northern Europe. Leonhart Fuchs's De Historia Stirpium of 1542 set a new standard for plant identification, and the Dutch and Flemish floral still life of the seventeenth century, built on the same observational rigour, treated rare tulips and ranunculus with the seriousness reserved elsewhere for portraiture. Maria Sibylla Merian's late seventeenth century work in Suriname combined botanical illustration with detailed entomological observation in a way that prefigured modern ecology.

The high point of the medium came in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the great hand-coloured plates of Pierre Joseph Redouté, John James Audubon, John Gould, and Walter Hood Fitch. They served the boom in scientific publishing that accompanied European colonial collecting, but they also produced some of the most considered design work of the period. Audubon's Birds of America remains the canonical example, an enormous double elephant folio whose plates were hand-coloured one bird at a time.

The prints gathered here cover the tradition across these phases: herbal woodcut, eighteenth century engraved florilegium, Romantic hand-coloured lithograph, and twentieth century scientific illustration. The collection sits beside the gallery's Seascape & Maritime Art holdings, the related observational tradition turned outward to ocean and coast, and the Classic Drawings & Etchings selection, where the same draftsmanship is applied to figure and architecture.