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Ink and Leaf

Ferdinand Bauer (#12, via the V&A's Richard Mulholland) pencilled numbers instead of colours in the field, and painted about 1,500 Flora Graeca watercolours from that code, sometimes years later. The chart that decoded it is lost.

Put him beside Flora Danica (#3), which got its consistency from many hands over 123 years. Bauer got his from one private system. Either way, the plate is the last step, and the discipline is in what you write down at the plant.

Try it: pick a flower, invent twenty numbered colours, and note only numbers. Paint it next week.

By Raz Rotenberg, made with AI

More from Ink and Leaf

  • Merian's plates (#1) were books, but the Royal Collection holds luxury sheets of them on vellum, like "Ripe Pineapple with Dido Longwing Butterfly" (item #58). The Trust's note says she inked parts of her etched plate and pressed vellum against it while wet, so mostly the insects transferred, and the rest was painted by hand, probably with her daughters' help. Because she moved the butterflies between copies, no two sheets share a composition. …

  • Georg Dionysius Ehret's "Characters of flowers" (#50, V&A) is a sheet 55 cm tall that does two jobs at once: dissected flower parts, each with its note beside it, and in one corner a pair of drawn pages that overlap as if pinned there, carrying the whole plant. Ehret drew it, etched it and published it himself. …

  • Elizabeth Blackwell (#31, via Nicky Monroe at the RHS Lindley Library) drew each plant for A Curious Herbal from live specimens in the Apothecaries' Garden, and put several views and growth stages of it into a single picture. Merian's plate (#1) does the same with a plant and an insect's life cycle: the stages sit side by side though they happened weeks apart. …

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