Illustration by Ferdinand Bauer.
Bauer, Ferdinand, Subject Birds.
A pair of hooded parrots painted by Ferdinand Bauer.
Banksia coccinea, Plate 3 from Illustrationes Florae Novae Hollandiae.
Robert Brown, Scottish botanist and palaeobotanist who made important contributions to botany largely through his pioneering use of the microscope.
Franz Andreas Bauer, 1758 – 1840, Austrian microscopist and botanical artist.
Nicolaus Joseph von Jacquin, Austrian botanist,chemist.
1830
1830
(This hand-colored lithograph by Ferdinand Bauer shows the...)
This hand-colored lithograph by Ferdinand Bauer shows the Stylidium violaceum, commonly known as triggerplants.
1830
artist illustrator naturalist scholars
Ferdinand Lucas Bauer was born on January 20, 1760, in Feldsberg, Lower Austria. He was the third son of Lucas Bauer and his wife, Theresia. He was the younger brother of an equally celebrated botanical artist, Franz Andreas Bauer (1758-1840), who from 1788 onwards spent most of his life at Kew portraying cultivated plants, some from Australia.
With his brothers Joseph and Franz, Bauer was educated by Father Boccius, prior of the monastery of the Merciful Brothers in Feldsberg, then worked under Nikolaus von Jacquin, professor of botany in Vienna.
When Sibthorp, Oxford’s professor of botany, came to Vienna in search of the Codex vindobonensis of Dioscorides, he learned of Bauer’s work and traveled to Feldsberg to see Boccius’ fourteen-volume manuscript, Hortus botanicus, the 2,750 plates of which were chiefly the work of Ferdinand and his brothers. So impressed was Sibthorp that he immediately engaged Bauer to serve as an artist on his expedition to Greece and the Levant. In the ensuing twenty-two months (March 1786 to December 1787) Bauer painted nearly 1,000 watercolors of plants, 363 of animals, and 131 sepia landscapes. Only the plant watercolors were eventually published in the Flora Graeca, a herculean work that took from 1806 to 1840 and cost over £30,000.
Bauer worked on the Flora in Oxford until 1801, when he joined Matthew Flinders on his voyage to Australia. There Bauer and the botanist Robert Brown made a rich collection of material that included over 2,000 sketches by Bauer, 1,541 being of plants. Few of these were ever published, although Endlicher used some for his Prodromus florae Norfolkicae. Bauer attempted to use them in his illustrationes florae Novae Hollandiae, a project that failed commercially, and in 1814 he left England for Hietzing, which was close to the gardens of Schonbrunn.
Bauer sketched rapidly and colored little on the spot, but noted gradations with a number code so that he could finish his illustrations later. Untroubled by the rigors of travel, he worked hard and achieved an incredible output. Goethe admired the three-dimensional quality of his work, and all botanists respected his accuracy. The overthrow of Linnaean taxonomy was partly due to the Australian work of Bauer and Brown.
Bauer’s original drawings for the Flora Graeca are in the Department of Botany in Oxford and those of Australian and Norfolk Island plants and animals are in the Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna. 236 perfected drawings of plants and 49 of animals are in the British Museum (Natural History), London. The National Library of Australia owns a gouache, Stuartia malachodendron. Bauer’s unpublished drawings of Greek landscapes are in Oxford and Göttingen (Universitäts Bibliothek). Two volumes of watercolors of forty species of passion-flowers (including an Australian species, Passiflora cinnabarina ), evidently done after 1814, were in the possession of the Horticultural Society of London until sold in 1859, then in the Preussische Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, until 1941, and now in the Jagiellon Library, Cracow. The generic name Bauera (Banks ex Andrews) for a small group of Australian shrubby plants commemorates the two Bauer brothers, Franz and Ferdinand.
Bauer was the most reputed botanical painter of the late 18th century who is best remembered for his significant painterly contribution to Codex Liechtenstein, a sumptuous collection of over 3000 hand-colored botanical illustrations. He is seen by many as the greatest natural history painter of all time. Bauer's major achievement was in the development of the unique technique of sketching and color-coding in the field, and then coloring later - painting by numbers.
Robert Brown was a Scottish botanist and palaeobotanist who made important contributions to botany largely through his pioneering use of the microscope. His contributions include one of the earliest detailed descriptions of the cell nucleus and cytoplasmic streaming; the observation of Brownian motion; early work on plant pollination and fertilisation, including being the first to recognize the fundamental difference between gymnosperms and angiosperms; and some of the earliest studies in palynology.
He was an Austrian microscopist and botanical artist.
Nikolaus Joseph Freiherr von Jacquin or Baron Nikolaus von Jacquin (16 February 1727 – 26 October 1817) was a scientist who studied medicine, chemistry and botany.
