Trop picks: Botanical illustration
The Anglo-Indian botanical paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represent the reunification of two long-lost branches, one scientific and one humanistic, of a classical tradition.
Both Indian and British botanical art have roots in antiquity, when medicinal texts such as Dioscorides’ De Material Medica contained illustrations of various herbs. Over the centuries, these treatises traversed the globe, where they were copied by craftsmen for physicians and chemists, who would consult them repeatedly.
Within the European world, such early attempts at scientific thinking had evolved by the eighteenth century into a full-blown Scientific Age. In Sweden, the taxonomist Carl Linnaeus had set about documenting his ecosystem and, in the process, transformed the study of the natural world. Wanting to play their part in the scientific project, the lively and curious merchants of the British East India Company commissioned local artists to record their "discoveries" within their Indian concessions, which they then eagerly shared with the European hubs.
In the Islamic world, alongside the more practical offshoot of botanical illustration, a separate tradition of aesthetic appreciation of the natural world developed. Islamic traders and then conquerors brought these traditions to India, where they reached their apogee under the Mughal emperors. The Mughal love of flowers combined with the Hindu emphasis on an inner rather than outer understanding of nature, resulting in an Indian school of botanical painting.
After the Mughals fell from glory, the artists of this school were grateful to find employment at the hands of the British. As the East India Company consolidated its hold on the subcontinent, explorers were replaced by administrators. British officialdom now demanded that Indian botanical paintings look more “European” and encouraged local artists to adopt European techniques of perspective and shadowing. They began to paint on imported English, rather than Indian, paper. Pigment that had once been applied laboriously layer by layer to achieve a richness of palette was now replaced by English watercolors.
Still, this hybrid Indo-European art stubbornly resisted assimilation into European traditions. Its unruliness could be demonstrated through a characteristic tendency for such paintings “to spring straight out of the edge of the paper and to slant diagonally across it.” (For a great contemporary take on this, see the art of Syaiful Garibaldi.) As though, like nature itself, art would not bend entirely to the will of the new master capitalists.
Sources:
Essay by Stuart Cary Welch, Curator of Hindu and Muslim Painting, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, in Indian Botanical Paintings, The Hunt Insitute for Botanical Documentation, 1980.