ISS: Information Services and Systems

NATURE OBSERVED: THE WORK OF THE BOTANICAL ARTIST
An exhibition of books from the Foyle Special Collections Library.

Exhibition curator: Hugh Cahill

Cacti, from: Elizabeth Twining. Illustrations of the natural orders of plants with groups and descriptions. London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1868. [Early Science Collection QK98 TWI]

Even in the age of photography botanical illustration remains an important part of botanical science. Plants must be depicted with a level of detail which allows the botanist to distinguish one species or variety from another. The botanical artist can emphasise features and details that a photograph cannot hope to pick up. As the writer on botanical art, Wilfrid Blunt, put it in his The art of botanical illustration, "there is still a certain amount of work in which the camera is no substitute for the pencil".

The work of the best botanical artists blends science with beauty. By closely observing nature and striving to record accurately what he sees the artist can create a work of scientific worth that is also pleasing to the eye. The poet Goethe, who had a deep interest in botany and was a competent botanical draughtsman himself, neatly summed up the balance the botanical illustrator must strike between scientific accuracy and aesthetic appeal. Comparing the work of the flower painter and those illustrating more scholarly botanical works he wrote that "the one had only to satisfy the lover of superficial beauty; the other has to give truth - and through truth, beauty".

This exhibition traces some of the main developments in botanical illustration over the past five hundred years. It focuses on the artists themselves and the contributions they have made to botany in general and to botanical illustration in particular. Examples of the work of some of the finest botanical artists are displayed, such as the innovative and delicate woodcuts of Hans Weiditz in the sixteenth century to the delicate pictures of Elinor Frances Vallentin in the twentieth. All the works in the exhibition are drawn from the collections of the Foyle Special Collections Library and can be consulted there.

Below are links to representations of the contents of the exhibition cases. Click on these to view them or use the arrow keys to view the exhibition in order.

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• Case 1: The early illustrated herbals
• Case 2: The later herbals
• Case 3: William Curtis and The Botanical Magazine
• Case 4: The British flora described
• Case 5: Popular botany in the nineteenth century
  
• Case 6: From the four corners of the Earth