Exotica: Plant Portraits from Around the World
September 29 to November 14, 2004
Lora Robins Gallery of Design from Nature,
University of Richmond Museums

On September 29, 2004, the Lora Robins Gallery of Design from Nature, University of Richmond Museums, will open Exotica: Plant Portraits from Around the World. This exhibition features sixty-one prints from the “Golden Age” of Western botanical art — the period between 1600 and 1850 before photography became the most efficient and cost effective method of recording nature for scientific investigation.

Included in Exotica is a hand-colored lithograph from The Birds of America (1827-1844) by John J. Audubon (American, 1785-1851), images by Mark Catesby (English, 1682-1749) of flora and fauna from the British colonies of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahamas (1731-1743), and color stipple engravings by Pierre Joseph Redouté (French, 1759-1840), who was one of the most prolific and talented botanical artists of his time.

The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century provided a means to multiply and disseminate images and text, and botanical reproductions were used as early as the 1480s to illustrate books on herbs and their uses. Sixteenth-century European botanists, then known as herbalists, made careful descriptions of many plants, particularly the medicinally important ones, and established a sound foundation for further botanical study.

During the “Golden Age” of botanical illustration, scientific study of flora burgeoned, particularly with the interest in plants from the New World. In a typical folio publication, the scientist wrote descriptions of the natural environment, the artist accurately drew the specimen, the printer carved or engraved the image onto a matrix (such as a wood block or metal plate), the colorist hand-colored each printed image, and finally the book was assembled, published, and distributed to the subscribers. These subscribers included landed gentry, physicians, merchants, booksellers, fellow naturalists, and patrons of the arts.

Some of the earliest illustrations in the exhibition are from the 1613 folio Hortus Eystettensis (Garden of Eichstatt) by Basilius Besler (German, 1561-1629). Besler chronicled a lavish garden that surrounded the castle of Prince Bishop of Eichstatt, near Nuremberg, Germany. The garden featured every known flower and shrub — many of the exotic flowers were imported from the Americas and from the Ottoman Empire. More than just a comprehensive compendium of plant types, Besler’s work was also one of the first publications to depict flowers as objects of beauty.

Another series of prints come from The Temple of Flora (1797-1810) by Dr. Robert John Thorton (English, 1768-1837). Thorton employed artists and engravers to develop the seventy plates, which would illustrate Linnaeus’ discoveries about the reproductive system of plants. An ambitious project that caused him financial ruin, The Temple of Flora, with only twenty-eight engravings completed, became the best known of all flower books. Each plate situates the flowers in a fantastic or romantic setting or landscape.

Exotica was organized by the Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, West Virginia. The exhibition’s presentation at the Lora Robins Gallery of Design from Nature, University of Richmond Museums, is part of a fifteen-city national tour over a three-year period, circulated by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services, Kansas City, Missouri.

The exhibition’s presentation at the Lora Robins Gallery of Design from Nature, University of Richmond Museums, and the accompanying programs were made possible in part with the support of the University’s Cultural Affairs Committee.