One unusually hot morning in April 1999, a woman in her early twenties boarded a busy train for Oxford at Paddington station. All was smiles so far as Didcot. Then the trouble began.
The overture was a faint but undeniable raspberry blown from within her cricket bag. The embarrassing parp was nothing, however, compared with the stench that followed. It started slowly and on a deceptively sweet note, but after a while and with the train still showing no sign of moving, the odour turned to purulent carrion. It soon filled the carriage with asphyxiating force. By the time the train arrived at Oxford the young woman was seated alone. What her companions could not have known as they moved to adjoining carriages, at first in apologetic dribs and drabs, later with Gadarene frenzy, was that they had just had a brush with a dragon.
Or a dragon arum, Dracunculus vulgaris, to be precise. The artist Camilla Speight had decided to take a specimen of this sinister native of the eastern Mediterranean and Aegean to Oxford for a weekend’s peaceful drawing. Spurred on by the heat and agitation, the plant had furtively unpacked its liverish red and black inflorescence and released its scent — nectar to bluebottles, necrosis to the rest of us.
As the person who grew the dragon arum in question and helped to carry it to the train, I have often felt a twinge of guilt at placing Speight in such peril.
But hazardous journeys are part of the true botanical artist’s territory. Think of poor Sydney Parkinson, who accompanied Captain Cook on the Endeavour. He died of dysentery in 1771, aged 26, and was buried at sea, but not before having drawn about a thousand of the southern hemisphere’s newly discovered species. In our own time, Margaret Mee paddled her canoe along hundreds of miles of Amazon tributaries and still managed to keep her sketchbooks and chignon miraculously dry.
Bandana on face, Camilla Speight ultimately triumphed over the vegetable monster, and the resulting drawing was acquired by that unparalleled patroness of botanical art Dr Shirley Sherwood. This week her dragon arum makes a return journey to Oxford, but in safely two- dimensional, odour-free form. It features in A New Flowering, an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum that assembles great botanical drawings, prints and paintings of the past thousand years and points to a bright future for this most venerable of all the life sciences’ adjuncts.
Dr Sherwood has acted as guest curator for the show, which includes many works, contemporary and old, from her own collection, the world’s largest and most illustrious. But she has also turned detective for the event, tracing obscure provenances and scouring Oxford’s sometimes secretive libraries, to bring to light “lost” masterpieces and other images that have not been seen since the era of their making.
In flair and finish, the book accompanying the exhibition follows the example of Dr Sherwood’s two earlier publications, Contemporary Botanical Artists and A Passion for Plants. But those drew on her collection of contemporary artists and were intended to herald a renaissance in botanical art.
In the Ashmolean publication, as in the show itself, she has the run of the entire surviving Western tradition, from early medieval herbals to representations of species that have only just been discovered and whose mysteries, although still related in stroke and stipple, are revealed by sophisticated microscopy.
“It would have been easy to arrange all these works in chronological order and to suggest some sort of sweeping progress towards greater and greater realism,” Dr Sherwood says. “But that isn’t what really happened or is happening in botanical art. There are periods and schools, but there are also unique individuals who seem to spring from nowhere, and people who are eerily connected in style or subject sometimes over centuries. There are illustrators who work only with the needs of science in mind but who manage to produce great art. There are others who are primarily fine artists, but who create works of real botanical accuracy nonetheless.”
To accommodate all these characters, styles and motivations, the catalogue, like the exhibition, is arranged synchronically by theme. Since Dr Sherwood is a botanist, the theme is botanical. A section on thistles, for example, juxtaposes two images of these plants that give us the alpha and omega version of botanical art. One is a coarse but recognisable depiction from the Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius, a volume made in Bury St Edmunds about 1080 and usually kept in the Bodleian Library. This thistle is the product of centuries of copying and corrupting of illustrations that were probably prepared for the herbalist Dioscorides during the reign of Vespasian. Beside it hangs a photo-realistic watercolour of the same species by 40-year-old Helen Haywood which leaves us in no doubt that she looks with her own eyes, and closely, too.
Yet the woodcut prints of conifers found in Mattioli’s commentary on Dioscorides of 1554 are startlingly fine, fresh and realistic. At the Ashmolean they stand up well to their modern counterparts, among them Brigid Edwards’s 1993 painting of a single cone of the Douglas fir Pseudotsuga menziesii. At 250x180cm (8ftx6ft), 100 times life-size, this fir cone is a magnificent example of the school of epic intimacy or magniloquent minutiae which is one of the newer departures in botanical art. Or is it? Nikolaus Joseph Jacquin’s illustration of a cone of the South African cycad Encephalartos horridus might equally be classed as such, and that dates from 1804.
Unlike Mrs Edwards’s fir cone, Jacquin’s cycad is an example of pure functionality in botanical art. It is beautiful, yes. But it was produced to furnish scientific evidence of a newly discovered and described species. The beauty is a byproduct. The same is true of the many of the images made in the same era by Ferdinand Bauer for the leviathan publication Flora Graeca.
All their loveliness is sworn to the service of identification and cold discrimination. Bauer ultimately tired of his imperious master in this project, the Oxford Professor of Botany, John Sibthorp, becoming artist to Matthew Flinders’s 1801-05 expedition to Australia. But not before he had painted the notorious dragon arum, an illustration that appears in this exhibition alongside Camilla Speight’s of two centuries later.
Bauer’s dragon looks left and is richly painted. Speight’s looks right and is monochrome, composed of the millions of dots that are her trademark and tribute to the engravings of past masters. Otherwise they are perfectly matched in accuracy and menace, a striking example of a phenomenon that Dr Sherwood is at pains to illustrate in this exhibition — how one organism can produce remarkably similar responses from artists working at different times, in different media and in ignorance of one another.
The Ashmolean exhibition is rightly called A New Flowering. Botanical art has never before been so popular or so thickly populated with practitioners. West End galleries regularly feature them (although wised-up would-be patrons prefer to hunt down commission-free artists exhibiting at the Royal Horticultural Society’s London Flower Shows). Courses and books proliferate. But the best of the new crop remain true to the botanical artist’s original calling. Scale, medium and emotions may vary, but accuracy is paramount.
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, continues to employ botanical artists, as do many other of the world’s great biological institutions. When a new species is published, or an old one revisited, botanists look not to a photographer to produce the image that will become its standard of identification, but to an artist. These scientists are not romantics or Luddites. They simply know that a good drawing can focus, reveal and compare more tellingly than the best photograph ever could. That we can find the results beautiful, charming, downright repugnant, or dazzlingly virtuosic suggests that botanical art is one place where the two cultures find common ground.
A New Flowering: 1,000 Years of Botanical Art is at the Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street, Oxford, from Monday to Sept 11
