Ferdinand Bauer

Botanical illustration of red flowers with narrow green leaves
Illustration of two leafy sea dragons with elongated bodies and leaf-like appendages
Botanical illustration of a flowering plant with tall stems and round, blue flowers, along with detailed views of its flowers, leaves, seeds, and parts.

Ferdinand Bauer (1760-1821) is generally recognised as the finest botanical artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries

“…nature is revealed, art concealed, great in its precision, gentle in its execution, decisive and satisfying in its appearance”.

Johanne Wolfgang von Goethe, 1817

He was appointed Natural History Draughtsman, on the recommendation of Sir Joseph Banks, to Captain Mathew Flinder’s circumnavigation of Australia in HMS Investigator (1801-1803).

As an obsessive perfectionist, he engraved his own plates from his own watercolours and then printed, coloured and published his own work.

This collection is extraordinary not only because the quality of the plates is unsurpassed, but also because no further impressions have been taken between the original publication (with 23 subscribers) and this current edition, which is limited to 35 numbered portfolios.

A separate limited edition of 50 complete sets of 46 watercolour drawings of animals, also from the Flinder’s voyage, have been hand-printed, one-at-a-time, by the stochastic process.