The artwork of Curtis's Botanical Magazine

{Journals}curt/17-1/s152/s152.3d

THE ARTWORK OF CURTIS�S BOTANICAL MAGAZINE

Brent Elliott

William Curtis founded his Botanical Magazine during the heyday ofthe British enthusiasm for the Linnaean system of classification, forwhich Curtis himself was an important propagandist. During itsearly decades, as a result, it shared with the representativebotanical works of its period certain conventions of illustration.The most important factor in classification, according to Linnaeus,was the number of sexual organs; it followed that the mostimportant goal of the illustrator was the accurate portrayal ofthe flower. Those parts of the plant which had no diagnosticsignificance in Linnaeus� eyes could be simply eliminated, so thatroots had virtually disappeared from botanical illustration by 1750(except in the cases of bulbs and of economically significant roots).Leaves and stems, though unimportant at the generic level, wereuseful for distinguishing one species from another; but the amountof information about them that the artist needed to display couldbe greatly simplified.

The early illustrations in Curtis tended, therefore, to be portraitsof detached flowers, with sufficient leaf and stem added to conveywhat was important diagnostically. Eleven of the plates in the firstvolume depict roots � primarily bulbous plants, but also Primulavillosa (t. 14) and Geranium reichardi (t. 18). Many works of the lateeighteenth and early nineteenth centuries introduced extrainformation about the leaf by representing it in outline as abackground to the plate. The best-known English work of this sortwas Sowerby and Smith�s English Botany, but Sowerby�s illustrationsfor this were made after his major involvement with the BotanicalMagazine had ended. It was not until the 1810s that John Curtisand Sydenham T. Edwards began to make leaf outlines a regular,if not constant, feature of the Magazine�s plates.

Edwards sometimes extended this technique to the provision ofsupplementary depictions in line of the plant�s habit: for example,on plate 1260 (1810), a line-engraving of the habit of Yucca gloriosaappears to the left of the coloured illustration, and for plates 903(Nelumbium speciosum) and 1605 (Crinum amabile), un-coloured line-engravings of the habit appear in each case as an additional plateB. But against such interesting experiments in depiction can be set

# Bentham-Moxon Trust 2000. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road,Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA 35


the criticisms of sheer inaccuracy in various early plates (seeDesmond, 1987: 39�40).

The most important contribution of the Magazine to botanical artbefore the 1830s, apart from the sheer quantity of plantsrepresented, was the increasing uniformity of colouring of thepublished plates. It had long been notorious that the colouring ofprinted works was erratic and unreliable when left to theuncontrolled resources of purchasers; Dionys Dodart deliberatelyhad as much engraved texture as possible introduced into theplates of the MÑemoires pour servir Ða l �histoire des Plantes in order that theplates should remain uncoloured. The early eighteenth centurysaw the first experiments in colour printing, with Elisha Kirkall�smezzotints for John Martyn�s Historia Plantarum Rariorum (1728�37),followed shortly by the Catalogus Plantarum of the Society ofGardeners (1730), and on the continent by Weinmann�s Phytanthoza(1734�47), whose plates were a combination of mezzotint andetching by Bartholomaus Seuter and Johann Elias Ridinger(Henrey, 1975: II, 52�4, 212�3, 677�80; Elliott, in press). Butthese experiments had few progeny, and at the end of theeighteenth century the sale of uncoloured copies of works was stillmore frequent than copies with publishers� colouring. Commercialcolouring was on the increase, however, through the medium ofsmall family businesses: artists� families provided useful means ofensuring that a print-run might be coloured under the artists�supervision. Thirty colourists were employed on the BotanicalMagazine in its early years, though we lack details of how their workwas assigned; Samuel Curtis, who took over the printing of themagazine in 1811, used four of his daughters as colourists(Desmond, 1987: 37�38).

The beginning of the nineteenth century saw the establishmentof what might be called the assembly-line system of colouring, inwhich each colourist was given a single colour, and a coloured-inspecimen plate; it was his or her job to apply that colour to thesame areas on each copy in the print run. The result: virtualuniformity of colouring from copy to copy. The publishing houseof Ackermann boasted the most famous of colouring factories(Ford, 1983), but its success was soon emulated. By the 1820s,standardisation of colouring in the Botanical Magazine had beenachieved. A comparison of a drawing by John Curtis, ofChrysanthemum indicum, with the plate printed from it, shows how

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Fig. 1. John Curtis, original drawing of Chrysanthemum indicum for the Botanical Magazine 46: tab.2042 (1819). Royal Horticultural Society, Lindley Library, London.


Fig. 2. Botanical Magazine 46: tab. 2042 (1819). Chrysanthemum indicum: hand-coloured engravingafter John Curtis.


close and accurate a rendition of the original had been achieved, incolouring as well as in engraving (Figs. 1 & 2).

At the end of the 1820s, William Jackson Hooker, as well assuch occasional artists as John Stevens Henslow, LansdownGuilding, and James McNab, all increased the quantity ofdissections and the use of the leaf outline in the background; andonce Hooker became the principal artist, dissections came to bestandard features of Botanical Magazine plates, so that the absenceof a dissection became more remarkable than its inclusion. In1832, Hooker illustrated Coroupita guianensis with two plates, 3158being the standard plant portrait, and 3159 being devoted purelyto a series of dissections.

The principal artist during the Victorian period was WalterHood Fitch. His earliest contributions were nothing remarkable:plate 3353, Mimulus roseus [ = lewisii] (1837), did not even includea dissection, though this deficiency was made up in his secondplate, of Rhodochiton volubile (3367). The work of the little-documented Miss M.Young in the same volume (see plates 3356,Jambosa vulgare, and 3360, Eriodendron anfractuosum) exhibited amuch higher standard, and prefigure the work that Fitch waslater to achieve (or else provided a model for him). Fitch quicklybecame the sole artist, and the quality of his work improved.John Curtis and Hooker had gradually heightened the depictionof texture in their plates by increasing chiaroscuro: an effortwhich, in engraving, required the multiplication of lines todarken portions of leaf or flower. (Unlike contemporary wood-engravers, the illustrators of the Botanical Magazine stuckresolutely to the use of parallel lines and avoided cross-hatching.)Some of Miss Young�s plates, like the Jambosa, carriedchiaroscuro to its greatest heights hitherto in the Magazine; butas the 1840s progressed, Fitch came to rival her achievement, aswell as similarly exploiting the effects of bold arrangement ofspecimens on the page (for example, in the truncation of thespecimen at the edges of the plate).

Part of the improvement of Fitch�s work can be attributed to hiscollaboration with Franz Bauer on Hooker�s Genera Filicum in theyears around 1840. Bauer had been an early enthusiast forlithography: the uniform dusty texture of lithographic shadingoffered an immense improvement over line-engraving as a meansof representing texture, and chiaroscuro could be increased in a

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less visually intrusive manner than by multiplying lines. In 1845,engraving was discontinued in the Botanical Magazine, andreplaced by lithography from plate 4174 (Desmond, 1987: 86for details); and Fitch was given the opportunity to apply his skillsin the new medium, both drawing and lithographing his ownplates.

Fitch�s work from the early 1840s led in two directions. Theone less represented in the Botanical Magazine is best seen in hiswork in line: rapid sketches of habit that exhibit a light and airyquality. Plate 5762, of the palm Caryota cummingii (Fig. 3), is theclosest approach within the Magazine to the sort of work he did forMann and Wendland�s monograph on palms (Mann & Wend-land, 1863). The other direction lay in the heightening ofchiaroscuro, in the representation of the texture of plant surfaces,and in the arrangement of the plant on the page for maximumimpact, including ever greater ingenuity in the placing ofdissections and details. In the 1850s and early 1860s Fitchcharacteristically strengthened chiaroscuro by additional hand-tinting, giving the plates of that period a characteristic sheenwhen light is reflected from them. This tendency was toned downlater in his career.

The secret of Fitch�s work, explaining both its speed and thevarying degree of detail in its results, can be seen by comparinghis illustrations with the text they accompany. The same plantcould be drawn in different degrees of detail for differentpublications, if one of them was to accompany a botanicaldescription and the other a horticultural article. Fitch made over2000 drawings for the Botanical Magazine, and as a result has had areputation for slapdash work, which is largely undeserved (Lewis,1992; Elliott, 1996). For most of his career he worked fromherbarium specimens, and developed an amazing ability tovisualise the plant as it would have been when alive, althoughreviewers familiar with the plants sometimes criticised his flowercolours. The variability of his drawings can be explained bycomparing them with the text they were commissioned toaccompany: whatever the botanist left out of his description,Fitch tended to leave out too. For example, in 1866 Fitch madetwo drawings of Tacsonia van-volxemii (now Passiflora antioquiensis),for two different magazines: the April issue of the BotanicalMagazine, and the August issue of the Florist and Pomologist. For the



Fig. 3. Botanical Magazine 95: tab. 5762 (1869). Caryota cummingii by Walter Hood Fitch.


Fig. 4. Botanical Magazine 92: tab. 5571 (1866). Tacsonia van-volxemii (now Passiflora antioquiensis):hand-coloured engraving after Walter Hood Fitch.


Fig. 5. Walter Hood Fitch, drawing of Tacsonia van-volxemii (now Passiflora antioquiensis) for Florist &Pomologist 1866. Royal Horticultural Society, Lindley Library, London.


latter, to accompany a horticultural rather than a botanical text,Fitch copied his earlier drawing (so it appears inverted from theBotanical Magazine version), and left out those details that were notspecified in the text (Figs. 4 & 5).

By the 1870s, a reaction against high Victorian chiaroscuro andintensity was becoming apparent throughout the art world, and itsaffect on botanical illustration was exemplified in volume 104 ofthe Magazine, the volume which saw the transition from Fitch to hissuccessors. Worthington G. Smith, Harriet Thiselton-Dyer, andMatilda Smith, all produced work which was flatter and sparerthan Fitch�s: less crowded plates, with more empty space onthe page, and a less complicated arrangement of details anddissections. Smooth organisation was succeeding dramatic pre-sentation in botanical art generally (Elliott, 1996), and the newtendency was to remind the viewer of a herbarium specimenlaid out on a sheet; highlights, and other indications of three-dimensionality, were eliminated, as was the use of backgroundoutlines. Once Matilda Smith became the principal artist, her workbegan to develop, to take up more of the page, and sporadically toemulate Fitch�s work in dramatic presentation, but it never did soconsistently.

With the take-over of the Botanical Magazine by the RoyalHorticultural Society in 1922, Lilian Snelling became the principalartist. Her early drawings showed the influence of Henry GeorgeMoon: accurate representation of habit, and the suppression of finedetail in favour of semi-impressionistic colour wash. Her work atthe Royal Botanical Garden, Edinburgh, had chastened her style,however, and made her skilled in the depiction of botanical detail.She quickly demonstrated a new interest in manipulating thearrangement of plants on the page, and in playing the colouredand line portions of the plate against each other. The arrival of aninnovative talent was made apparent in her first volume, with thecontrast in plate 8951 (Echinocactus undulatus) between the fore-ground coloured specimen and the merely shaded specimenbeyond; she revived the use of background leaf outlines, butshading them instead of merely using line, and even partially tintedher dissections (see plate 8915, Oreocharis aurantiaca published inthe �Cory volume�, vol. 147, 1938). As her work progressed, sheincreasingly exploited washy water-colour effects, seen mostobviously in her treatment of berried plants [see for example plate



9658, Vaccinium duclouxii, in the 1943�48 volume and reproducedhere (Fig. 6)]. The dedication to her in vol. 169 emphasised her�remarkable delicacy of accurate outlines, brilliancy of colour andintricate gradation of tone�.

The transition from Lilian Snelling to Stella Ross-Craig seems toreplay, in less exaggerated form, the earlier transition from Fitch tohis successors: more blank space on the page, cleaner presentationof a single specimen, a reduction in the number of backgroundoutlines, and the elimination of dissections. This time, however,much of the change resulted from an administrative policy: from1935, dissections were placed in the text pages as line illustrationsinstead of in the coloured plates. The decision to abandon thehand-colouring of plates in 1948 and adopt a four-colour halftoneprocess instead (see Desmond 1987: 188�191) resulted inevitablyin an immediate reduction in the printed quality of the images.After a year, photolithography was introduced instead, but thesimplification of colour remained a challenge for the artist, whonow had to struggle against a tendency to flattened uniformity incolour, or to a soft-focus washy effect if the tones were varied � notto mention the characteristic tipping of colour values towardyellow. The work of Margaret Stones and Ann V.Webster duringthe 1960s and 1970s shows the attempts to meet this challenge,with experiments ranging from the reintroduction of highlights tothe increased use of line and stipple to control and focus tonalvariation.

In the 1980s, especially with the launch of the Kew Magazine as anew (though interim) title, a new generation of artists began toappear in its pages, and to return, as well as improved techniquesof photolithography would allow, to the intensity of presentation ofthe age of Fitch. Pandora Sellars, Christabel King, and Ann Farrerhave revived the heightening of detail, the chiaroscuro, the un-standardised layouts, and the forceful truncation at the plate�s edgethat characterised the Botanical Magazine illustrations in the middlethird of the last century. They are also stretching the colour paletteof modern printing, and the printers can find themselves facingdifficulties in accommodating their colouring. But however theseproblems are resolved, and Curtis�s Botanical Magazine has begun itsthird century of production at an artistic high point � some,among them the present author, would say one of the two highestin its history.



Fig. 6. Botanical Magazine 164: tab. 9658 (1944). Vaccinium duclouxii by Lilian Snelling.


REFERENCES

Desmond, R. (1987). A Celebration of Flowers. Royal Botanic Gardens,Kew=Collingridge.

Elliott, B. (1996). Revealing variations. The Garden 121: 216�219.Elliott, B. (in press). Two eighteenth-century illustrated anthologies of

cultivated plants. Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society.Ford, J. (1983). Ackermann 1783�1983. Ackermann, London.Henrey, B. (1975). British Botanical and Horticulture Literature before 1800.

Clarendon Press, Oxford.Lewis, J. (1992). Walter Hood Fitch. HMSO, London.Mann, G. & Wendland, H. (1863). On the palms of western tropical Africa.

Journal of the Linnean Society 24: 421�39.

BOOK REVIEWS

Conifers of California by Ronald M. Lanner. x� 274 pp., 54 colourplates, numerous colour photographs, distribution maps. Cachuma Press,Los Olivos, California. 1999. ISBN 0-9628505-3-5. US $24.95.

Conifers are fascinating (as I know) and Ron Lanner�s latest book on thesubject beams this message radiantly from almost every page. He hasprobably not accidentally chosen the Californian conifers to get this messageacross; not only is the Golden State exceptionally endowed with a greatvariety of species, it appears to have few rival areas in the world when itcomes to superlative examples of this ancient group of woody plants. It istherefore most welcome to have a modern account of them that is so wellillustrated and available at such a modest price. An interesting feature is thatit has made use of hitherto unpublished botanical water-colours by the lateartist Eugene O. Murman, depicting botanical details for nearly all ofCalifornia�s conifer species. A few, mainly cypresses, recognised by C.B. Wolfbut not generally accepted (see below), were executed for this book by SusanBazell, who admirably approached the style of E.O. Murman. Distributionmaps, given for each species, are after a little known Forest Servicepublication by J.R. Griffin and W.B. Critchfield (1972) without apparentadditional data; in general they are however adequate in a state so wellresearched as California. The colour photography, supplied by manyphotographers, is generally excellent and in some cases superb and includesimages of such celebrated nature photographers as David Muench (mychampion among contemporaries). The text is light, often almost anecdotaland yet informative at least to the non-specialist. Is this, then, your classical�coffee-table book�? The publisher�s blurb on the back-cover calls it �both anatural history and field guide�; agreed, most coffee-table books are of alarger format and hard-bound, but it does not fit the pocket of my coateither. So where does it fit in among the numerous books on botany or trees,both popular and professional, that are issued in a never drying stream of


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The artwork of Curtis's Botanical Magazine