Botanical illustration. Art and science

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Botanical illustration – is a specific genre that combines seemingly incompatible qualities: on the one hand – scientific accuracy, and on the other – masterful painting. In exceptional cases, the botanist was able to express in the image the delight of the discoverer, admiration for the beauty and perfection of the orchid, which blooms very rarely, or a bush or a tree, which just came up with a name.

In times without photography and modern vehicles, the naturalist had to be able to have at least minimal art skills to draw still unexplored moss, butterfly, plankton that first came to his way. In the arsenal of the scientist, equipped for a distant overseas expedition, along with tweezers, a magnifying glass, a scalpel and an album for the herbarium were watercolor paints.

Artists became the first authors of botanical illustrations. For them, the accuracy of the image of trees and flowers was as important as the proportions of the human body and knowledge of anatomy. Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer devoted almost every second page of their albums to botanical sketches.

Scientists have become the next generation of authors of botanical illustration. Those who traveled to distant exotic countries spent a long time in wet tropical forests, suffered from seasickness and returned to their native lands with priceless seeds and drawings of still unseen plants, insects and birds. Some of them were able to see so closely the divine plan for the organization of all living things in the world that their watercolor sketches and hand-painted engravings became a source of endless inspiration for many generations of artists. 

Botanical illustration

Among the famous scientists who created pictorial «document» of the past were Ernst Haeckel, Marianne North, Pierre-Joseph Redoute. These most famous artists, the authors of botanical illustration, have formed a special artistic aesthetics, based on scientific precision and close attention to the smallest details.

In the second half of the 19th century, painting experienced a great revolution, which was reflected in botanical illustration. In Impressionist times in France, the details of plants were no longer painted, preferring images of the surrounding landscape and lighting effects. At the same time, in Britain, the only way that could take art to a new level, artists saw in imitation of nature in the smallest detail.

In the twentieth century, there were fewer and fewer unexplored places. Botanical atlases were formed, plants studied. Artists and sculptors of the Art Nouveau era still chose plant motifs, flowing lines, imitated botanical engravings. Their works were moved to private homes in the form of furniture, panels, wallpaper and more.

The influence of the brightest scientific botanical illustrations on art has never stopped. And already modern artists create their masterpieces under the influence of books by natural scientists of three hundred years ago. The anguish for a world that was new and full of mysteries, the thirst for discoveries and knowledge lead contemporary artists to search for new painting techniques and meanings.

You can easily join to these searches without special knowledge at our botanical illustration workshops in the «Lihtaryk» art studio. After all, this is a truly unique genre that combines art and science, develops attention to detail and allows you to create a real living «portrait» of the plant!

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