SF Bay Area exhibition of famous botanical art

Local Bay Area/California folks -

We attended the opening of an interesting exhibit yesterday, featuring botanical prints both old and new, at the Hearst Museum on the St. Mary's College Campus. I thought it might be of interest to many of you - certainly a rare opportunity to see some of the famous works of art up close. A few friends of mine also have some works on display among the recent works exhibited. Here is information from the Hearst Museum (web site: gallery.stmarys-ca.edu):

From a desire by 17th century scientists to discover and document the flora and fauna of new and known worlds comes this fascinating and elegant record of botanical life, Exotica: Plant Portraits from Around the World.
Exotica includes original prints from the Golden Age of botanical art, the tremendously rich period between 1600 and 1850. The arrival of the printing press in the fifteenth century provided a means to multiply and disseminate observations of nature. The exhibition features the most notable early figures in botanical illustration, many of whom were explores and scientists as well as artists: John James Audubon, Basilius Besler, Mark Catesby, Walter Hood Fitch, Pierre Joseph Redoute, Hendrik Van Rheede, Garrit Van Spaendonck, and Johann Weinmann. Patrons, engravers, printers, colorists, and bookbinders were also integral to the complex and costly process of producing a botanical folio. The 61 hand-colored etchings, engravings, and lithographs are on loan from the Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, West Virginia.
The Hearst Art Gallery’s exhibition is supplemented by a loan from Filoli Center of rare prints, books, and examples from a Bank's Florilegium, a folio of botanical prints. The complete Florilegium consists of 743 copper plate etchings from watercolors painted by artist and botanist Sydney Parkinson while traveling with Captain James Cook's first voyage to Tahiti, Australia, and New Zealand (1768 -1771). One of the members of Cook's voyage, described their preparations in a letter to Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish scientist and father of modern taxonomy, "No people ever went to sea better fitted for the purpose of Natural History, nor more elegantly outfitted. We have all sorts of machines for catching and preserving insects, all kinds of nets for coral fishing, and a curious contrivance of a telescope, by which, put in the water, you can see the bottom to a great depth." Fellow botanist and explorer Sir Joseph Banks underwrote much of their expedition.
Parkinson died on the trip and the copper plates etched from his watercolors remained unpublished in the British Museum of Natural History for 200 years. Filoli Center acquired the Florilegium, the most famous of its kind, in 1983.
The Hearst Art Gallery is also previewing the first four completed works from the Filoli Florilegium, currently in progress at the Center in Woodside, along with illustrations by major contemporary illustrators from the American Society of Botanical Artists, including Svetana Buchli, Kristin Jacob, Nancy Kaestner, Lee McCaffree, Sharron O’Neil, Catherine M. Watters, and tools used by modern botanical illustrators. Even in this era of precise, computer-generated images, technology has yet to rival the hand and eye of the artist.
Please call the Gallery at 925/631-4379 for additional information about group tours and special events including an introductory botanical illustration workshops for adults, taught by Catherine M. Watters on February 8, and a family workshop taught by Lee McCaffree on February 15. Watters and McCaffree are two of the artists selected by Filoli to create the modern florilegium.
The Hearst Art Gallery, accredited by the American Association of Museums, is open to the public Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. until 4:30 p.m.

Here are some of internet versions of the prints in this exhibition:
http://flood.nhm.ac.uk/cgi-bin/perth/cook/detail.dsml?IMAGNO=002540&detailtype=more
http://www.floridakeysbest.com/audubon/images/mango_hummingbird.jpg
http://www.smithkramer.com/exotica.html

Regards,
Seán O.

h o r t u l u s a p t u s - 'a garden suited to its purpose'
Seán A. O'Hara fax (707) 667-1173 sean@support.net
1034A Virginia Street, Berkeley, California 94710-1853, U.S.A.

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