The set of engravings of plants in the
Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s new exhibit, "Banks Florilegium:
An Eighteenth-Century Botanical Art Treasure Rediscovered,"
is of interest to everyone from scientists, to lovers of botanical
art to those who love a good old-fashioned story of adventure
on the high seas.
Curated by Patricia Jonas, the Garden’s director of library services,
these engravings are based on the botanical drawings of artist
Sydney Parkinson while aboard Captain James Cook’s voyage around
the world on the Endeavour from 1768 to 1771. Out of the 743
color engravings (in the Garden’s collection) that are made from
his works, Jonas culled just 36 for this exhibit.
The collection of engravings, Banks’ Florilegium, is named for
Joseph Banks, the British naturalist who with Daniel Solander
collected more than 30,000 plants in Brazil, Tierra del Fuego,
Society Islands (Tahiti), New Zealand, Australia and Java.
Jonas said she started whittling down the number of images to
be displayed by first including representatives of each of the
countries the botanists visited, but she also chose some that
are represented in the Botanic Garden’s own collections, and
labels them as such, so visitors can see the engraving and then
seek out its living counterpart.
"Of the 743 plants in the Florilegium, Banksias were an
easy choice for me: Banks and Solander were the first Europeans
to see this important Australian genus and it was the genus later
named for Banks," said Jonas. "Banksia includes over
70 species but Banksia serrata is fairly widespread and has the
colorful common name, ’Old Man Banksia.’ We also have an herbarium
specimen of that plant on display and a small plant in our living
collection.
"I also tried to choose those that had a good story or were
visually exciting," she continued. "For instance, one
of the weedy plants I chose is an endangered plant, Cook’s Scurvy
Grass from Australia. It’s not much to look at, but it’s an antiscorbutic
– it has properties that help fend off scurvy, which was a terrible
scourge of long sea voyages. They collected a lot of this on
the trip, so I included a story about scurvy."
Jonas said that after most of the voyage was over, only five
passengers on the Endeavour had scurvy and there were no deaths
from it, "as opposed to Magellan’s voyage where 80 percent
of the crew died of scurvy," she said.
While he did not die from scurvy, Parkinson did die of fever
six months before the end of the voyage, said Jonas. So Banks
commissioned other artists to finish Parkinson’s paintings, which
had meticulous notes, and engravings were then made from those
paintings. Upon landing, "Cook’s considerable cartographic
accomplishments were overshadowed in 1771 by the dazzling natural
wonders collected and cataloged by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander
and painted by Sydney Parkinson," explain the exhibition
panels. Despite this success, prints were not made from the Endeavour
engravings until 1983.
"Banks hired 18 engravers to create three tons of copper
plates that were engraved, and then it was never printed and
why is a matter of speculation," said Jonas. "In the
1980s, a fine press, Alecto Editions, approached the natural
history museum in England to publish it for the very first time
and that’s what we’re looking at [in the Garden’s exhibit]. The
[original] paintings and the copper plates are still in their
collection, where they sat for 200 years.
"So it’s an amazing publishing story, too," said Jonas.
"My original background was in publishing, so I’ve been
involved in projects that took a long time – but not 200 years
– to bring to completion."
Although Alecto only printed 100 copies of the Banks Florilegium,
the Botanic Garden received its own copy of the 743 engravings
as a gift from the family of the late Robert Duenner Jr. in 2003.
The prints on display are culled from this set.
While the paintings of plants in far off lands represented in
the Banks Florilegium were fascinating for 18th-century natural
history buffs and royalty alike ("King George III devoted
two weeks after the triumphant return of the Endeavour to studying
the drawings," according to the exhibition notes), botanical
art continues to be an important way of collecting qualitative
information about a plant and its seed, fruit and flowers for
today’s scientists, explained Jonas.
"Botanical art itself is still favored over photography
because of the universal detail it can capture and put into one
illustration," said Jonas. "A photograph may take many
angles, many times of the year but there have to be multiple
images, where a botanical artist can and does paint the plant
in one painting in various times of the year. The painting would
include a rendering of the flower, seed and important details
for identifying the plant – all on one illustration."
"I’m also curator of a contemporary florilegium, the Brooklyn
Botanic Garden Florilegium, a multi-year project to record in
watercolor, oil, and pen and ink the living collection at BBG,"
said Jonas. "Some of the United States’ finest botanical
artists paint the living collections here And we do something
very similar [to 18th century botanists]: painting the specimen
while it’s still fresh, before it wilts and fades, and we are
collecting the specimens and drying and pressing them. Both of
these records are essentially permanent records of the Brooklyn
Botanic Garden and the plants that grow here."
While Banks and his entourage were aboard the Endeavour to collect
specimens and data about the landscape, people and plants they
came across on the journey, the primary reason for the voyage
to Tahiti, which had recently been named King George III’s Island
by Captain Samuel Wallis, was to record the transit of Venus,
in a larger attempt to compute the distance between the Earth
and the sun. So the Botanic Garden’s exhibit also includes information
about that undertaking, excerpts from Banks and Parkinson’s meticulous
journals, actual dried plant specimens from the Endeavour voyage
and a reproduction of Parkinson’s sketch of a kangaroo – which
is probably the first ever made by a European.
Said Jonas, "[This exhibit] is interesting to botanical
artists working today, and to botanists for the information that
it contains about plants and specimens that were first collected
of those plants, and to people interested in the romantic story
of this great voyage."
"The Banks’ Florilegium: An Eighteenth
Century Botanical Art Treasure Rediscovered" is on display
now through April 10 in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Steinhardt
Conservatory (900 Washington Ave. at Eastern Parkway in Prospect
Heights). Free with garden admission: $5, $3 seniors and students
with valid ID, free for children age 15 and younger. For more
information, call (718) 623-7200 or visit the Web site at www.bbg.org.
