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  • Picturing Plants: An Analytical History of Botanical Illustration
  • Karen Reeds
Gill Saunders. Picturing Plants: An Analytical History of Botanical Illustration. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. 152 pp. Ill. $29.95.

Among the many well-illustrated histories and exhibit catalogues of botanical illustration, this one stands out, not just for the quality of its own pictures (101 well-chosen plates, many in color), but for its intelligent, detailed analysis of the “graphical languages that have been applied to the representations of botanical subjects” (p. 6). Over and over, Gill Saunders, an art historian at the Victoria and Albert Museum, shows us how the “graphic syntax” (p. 134) of the display of the plants on the page reveals the assumptions of a period, a culture, a technology, a discipline.

Take just one example: nature printing. All attempts to make a plant create its own exact image—smearing a leaf with lamp-black and pressing it onto a page (as Leonardo did), or mashing a fern into a soft sheet of lead or copper for printing as an electrotype, or exposing a dandelion on a photographic plate—succeeded in capturing some life-size structures (venation, hairs, leaf shape) far better than a drawing. Yet ultimately nature prints—and their successor technology, photography—underscore the importance of the artist as an active intermediary. The botanical artist can include whatever parts of a plant (no matter what size) are deemed important by a particular audience. The artist can convey generic three-dimensional structure by a deft use of the placement of parts (notably the twisted leaf), color, and shadows. The artist can suppress the defects of the individual specimen and emphasize the generic. Nature prints are flat and impoverished by comparison. Both to nineteenth-century commentators on these techniques and to us, Saunders notes, “the simulacrum [i.e., the drawing] carries more conviction, is more ‘real,’ than an impression of the thing itself, in terms of its value as a complete picture” (p. 144).

For all the differences between nature printing and the drawings of artists, both kinds of images do share a graphic convention that is so familiar we do not usually recognize it as a convention: “the de-contextualization or isolation of the specimen on a blank ground” (p. 15). Today, when we see a picture in which a plant is framed by white space, we assume that it is a botanical illustration. In the seventeenth century, however, as Saunders explains, the arrangement may simply reflect the contemporary gardening practice of setting out each plant in its own separate bed.

Whatever the origins of the isolation of the plant on the page, its effect is to concentrate our attention on the plant’s form and structure rather than on its relationships or uses. By making us aware of this ubiquitous convention, Saunders [End Page 753] invites us to think about its intellectual consequences. Every page of her splendid book rewards the reader with such insights into the meanings of scientific images.

Karen Reeds
Rutgers University Press
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