What is botanical illustration?

People have been depicting the natural world since they learned how to draw on cave walls. Plants, which are so important to our survival (as sources of food, medicine and shelter) and which are also so beautiful to us, have featured in art for thousands of years.

Jasper amulet featuring some lotus plants, ca. 7th-5th century BCE. Possibly Mesopotamian.

Attribution: Walters Art Museum. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Herbal by Dioscorides, a Greek botanist and physician, written between 50 and 70 CE.

Image is in the public domain in the U.S.

People make art for many different reasons, including for decoratation, to document a subject, to tell a story, to express an identity or belief, or as part of a ritual. Works of botanical art differ from purely aesthetic or symbolic depictions of plants. Botanical art began as a way to document and help people identify important plants, rather than just portray their beauty. 

There is evidence from Pliny the Elder that botanical illustrations began to appear as early as the first century B.C.E. in books concerning herbal medicine. After the classical age there was a major decline in realistic portrayals of plants, and it wasn't until the fifteenth century that more scientific approaches to plant illustration begin to appear again. Today the main goal of the discipline is still to depict plants with scientific accuracy. To achieve this, botanical artists often work with botanists to ensure that their art portrays all of the nessesary details for plant identification. Oftentimes there will be multiple views of the same plant or same part of a plant, such as inside and outside views of a dissected seed or fruit, and everything is drawn to scale.


Illustration from Leguminosae in Engelmann (ed.): Natürliche Pflanzenfamilien. Vol. III, 3.

This image is in the public domain in the U.S.

But why not just take a photo?

While photographs can also be useful for documenting and identifying plants, many botanists feel that botanical illustration can better ensure that all of the needed details and characteristics will be shown on the same drawing, even if it would be hard to find them that way in nature. The botanical artist can draw from the specimen, show the botanist they are working with, and then adjust the drawing as needed. Drawings can also show details more clearly than they might appear in photographs. However, it is important to note that great advances are always being made in photography and in photo editing software, and it will be interesting to see how botanical drawings fare in the years to come.

Despite their main goal being scientific accuracy, there is a definite beauty to botanical illustrations. Precision, accuracy, and an amazing wealth of detail can be just as pleasing to the eye as Impressionism, especially if the composition of the drawing is as elegantly composed and well-executed as some of the best botanical drawings are.


Interesting/Relevant Links

One example of a new way that photography is being used for botanical work--the C.V. Starr Virtual Herbarium at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG). The NYBG is currently working on digitizing their millions of Herbarium specimens (and have been for many years!) with the hope that their very high quality images will allow people from all over the world to study their specimens from afar.

Sources

Blunt, Wilfrid and William T. Stearn. The Art of Botanical Illustration. London, the Antique Collectors' Club Ltd.
Botanical Art. The NYBG.
Botanical Illustration. Botanic Gardens Conservation International.

Simpson, N. and Barnes, P. G. (2008), PHOTOGRAPHY AND CONTEMPORARY BOTANICAL ILLUSTRATION. Curtis's Botanical Magazine, 25: 258–280. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8748.2008.00628.x