31-7-2015 London

31-7-2015 London

Up at midnight but forced myself to go back to bed so slept from 1 to 4 am; in total 6 odd hours sleep, which is about the best so far. I slept fitfully until 6am then got up to breakfast and work on the computer. My WiFi access is only on the ground floor so I need to "set up shop" in the kitchen or TV room if I want to do any Internet work.

I decided to try walking to the NHM today, as I have been given directions through Kensington Gardens / Hyde Park to Albert Hall. The weather is good and it will save $1.50 on the bus. It took 45 mins (with a couple of detours).

Major task today was to set-up the request for boxes of botanical drawings I need next week. I took the opportunity to search the literature on Bauer for more background on his method. Today is Friday and the NHM Central Library is closed Sat, Sun, and Monday so I will get as much done as possible before three days "off".

Methodology:

Reference (1) from:

Erika Pignatti-Wikus, Christa Riedl-Dorn and David J. Mabberley,(2000)

Ferdinand Bauer’s field drawings of endemic Western Australian plants made

at King George Sound and Lucky Bay, December 1801 - January 1802. I: Families Brassicaceae, Goodeniaceae p.p., Lentibulariaceae, Campanulaceae p.p., Orchidaceae, Pittosporaceae p.p.,Rutaceae p.p., Stylidiaceae, Xyridaceae.

Rend. Fis. Acc. Lincei, (9), v. 11:69-109

“Appendix (chapter?) 4. The colour chart

Bauer uses a sophisticated colour-code system with numbers 1-994 representing different shades. The sketches and pencil drawings of King George III Sound and Lucky Bay bear about half the numbers between 1-994, an astonishing reflection of Bauer’s artistic sensivity. Although he took watercolour paints with him, he would have had no time during the collecting expedition to elaborate the drawings on board. Therefore each pencil outline drawing and detail of plant and animal species is accompanied by a series of numbers to be transformed later into correspondent colour nuances using the extremely precise chart. No contemporary description of how Bauer used his colour chart is known.

The chart itself is mentioned in a letter of 1806 by Sir Joseph Banks to the secretary of the Admiralty, describing Bauer’s pencil drawings from the Investigator voyage as «prepared in such a manner by reference to a table of colours as to enable him to finish them at a leisure with perfect accuracy» (Norst and McBride, 1988). It is still lost.

A much smaller colour chart was found together with T. Haenke’s notebook in the archive of Real Jardin Bot´anico in Madrid (Lack and Ib´a_nez, 1997). It is supposed that this colour chart, on which numbers 1-140 refer to various colours, might have been used by Bauer during an earlier period (Lack and Ib´a_nez, 1997)."

"Exceptionally Bauer used letters on his pencil drawings, it seems he did so mostly at the beginning of his work in Terra Australis; sometimes abbreviations are in German, sometimes in English. They most frequent ones are as follows:

Br - Pur - brown-purple

W, w - white (weiss)

Br R - brown-red (Germ.: braunrot)

G, gel - yellow (Germ.: gelb)

Gol, gol - golden (Germ.: gold)

l gl - light shiny (Germ.: leicht glaenzend)

purpur - purple (Germ.: purpurrot)

Pur - purple (Germ.: purpur)

P - purple (Germ.: purpur)

Pv - purple-violet, pale-violet?

R - red (Germ.: rot)

Or - orange (Germ.: orange)

Pinc, Pi - pink (Germ.: rosa)

Z, Z1 - number (Germ.: Zahl)

cilt. - ciliate

carm. - purple (Germ.: carminrot)

We have tried to reconstruct some parts of Bauer’s chart identifying the colours of certain species in nature, or comparing with the colours indicated for them in the literature (Blackall and Grieve, 1980; Erickson, 1981; Marchant et al., 1987; Carolin,1992). A few species may have flowers with different colour shades that vary from white to lilac to mauve (Goodeniaceae), from whitish to pink (Stylidiaceae), from yellow to orange to purple (Lechenaultia formosa) etc. In such cases we do not know what colour was observed by Bauer. Another source of error may be that not everybody has a refined sense of colour nuances as artists may have. A painter knows that mixing primary colours he can get others, e.g. red + blue = violet. By the mixture of two primary colours secondary colours are obtained; black and white are often loosely included.

Additional colours result from mixing white with other given colours (Biesalski, 1957; King, 1997). After a careful analysis of the colour-codes used in the sketches made by Ferdinand Bauer in Southwestern Australia, it seems that he had a colour chart in which the colour range sequence follows the combination of the three fundamental colours (table I):

red (fundamental colour)

pink, mauve (red intensity decreases/blue intensity increases)

violet (combination of red and blue)

blue (fundamental colour)

sage green (blue intensity decreases/yellow intensity increases)

green (combination of blue and yellow)

yellowish green (green intensity decreases/yellow intensity increases)

yellow (fundamental colour)

orange (yellow intensity decreases/red intensity increases)

brown (combination of yellow and red)

white

black

Table 1

1-100	red, dark red	2 3 4 5 6 14 15 17 18 19 24 25 26 27 28 30 34 35 36 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 51 52 54 55 56 61 62 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 77 82 85 87 88 92 94 96 97 100
101-200	purple, pink	102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 120 122 123 124 126 127 131 132 134 141 143 144 148 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 162 163 164 165 167 168 182 183 185 187 192 196
201-300	pink, mauve	206 208 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 225 229 230 231 232 234 235 236 237 238 239 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 253 256 257 258 260 261 264 265 269 270 271 272 276 277 295
301-400	lilac, violet, blue	308 312 313 316 317 318 319 320 321 325 326 326 327 331 332 333 334 336 338 340 342 343 344 349 352 353 354 355 358 360 361 362 364 389 393 394 395 396 398 399
401-500	pale sage green, green	413 417 424 433 443 444 479 490 493 494
501-600	dark green, yellowish green	504 505 506 507 509 511 514 517 518 519 520 521 522 524 525 536 539 540 541 542 543 547 548 557 559 566 569 571 576 577 578 580 585 586 587 588 589 590 591 592 593 594 595 596 597 598 599 600
601-700	Yellow	614 617 618 619 621 623 624 625 630 631 633 638 643 644 645 647 649 650 653 654 655 657 658 659 668 669 670 671 672 673 674 675 676 677 678 679 680 681 682 683 685 686 687 688 689 690 691 693 694 696 699
701-800	Orange	702 703 704 705 706 707 716 719 720 721 727 734 736 737 740 741 743 744 745 747 478 749 758 764 768 769 772 778 785 786 787 789 790 794 800
801-900	Brown	802 808 820 821 823 824 828 832 836 841 845 847 849 852 854 856 858 859 862 863 865 867 868 870 871 872 873 874 875 876 877 878 879 880 884 891 892 894 899 900
901-999	white, black	913 915 916 917 919 920 921 923 926 932 933 934 936

Reference (2). 

Lecture: Painted by numbers: decoding Ferdinand Bauer's Flora Graeca colour code

3 June 2015 1.00pm — 1.30pm

Venue:

Lecture Theatre, Weston Library (Map) Oxford University

Speaker(s):

Mr Richard Mulholland

Lunchtime lecture accompanying the exhibition Marks of Genius: Masterpieces from the Collections of the Bodleian Libraries. Oxford University.

Outside of the natural sciences, the work of Ferdinand Bauer (1760-1826), the pre-eminent eighteenth century natural history painter is little known. However, his botanical and zoological paintings on paper are considered to be among the finest in the world. Of particular interest is the unusual drawing and painting technique he used, recording colour information about specimens by annotating preliminary pencil sketches with numerical colour codes to be painted at a much later stage referring directly to a painted colour chart. This talk will discuss Bauer’s botanical illustrations for the Flora Graeca (1806-1840), one of the most lavish Flora’s ever published, the materials and techniques he used, and new research by the Bodleian’s Conservation Research department to identify Bauer’s 18th century palette, and recreate the lost colour chart that holds the key to fully understanding Bauer’s considerable expertise as an artist.

 Reference (3)

RECORDING FORM IN EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY BOTANICAL DRAWING. FERDINAND BAUER'S ‘CAMERAS’ by  H. Walter Lack

Curtis&apos s Botanical Magazine 04/2008; 15(s1):254 - 274. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8748.2002.tb00587.x

Reference (4). 
AN EXTINCT TREE ‘REVIVED’

Curtis&apos s Botanical Magazine 08/2007; 24(3):190 - 195. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8748.2007.00584.x

ABSTRACT Summary The recent decoding of a painting-by-numbers technique used in the Pacific over two hundred years ago has allowed the first complete portrayal in colour of a long-extinct island endemic, Solanum bauerianum Endl., restricted to Norfolk and Lord Howe Islands.

D Mabberly, E. W , Erika Pignatti-Wikus, Christa Riedl-Dorn (2007)

I also went through my notes from my first visit to the NHM in 2011 (now denoted as the "Feasibility study tour") and detailed the drawings already observed and photographed (but needed Photoshop).

London Natural History Museum (Visit 2, 2011, Bauer Botanical drawings/paintings photographed)

Primarily Northern Australia/Tropics.

Date	Photo number	Specimen number*	Comment
17/10/11	1 (4)	111
	2	115
	3 (2)	41	Pitcher plants
	4	47
18/10/11	5 (3)	19
	6 (2)	21
	7 (2)	23
	8 (2)	28
	9 (2 + 2)	29
	10 (2)	33
	11 (2)	34
File = 18/10/2011	12 (2)	35
19/10/11	13 (2)	56
	14 (2)	57
	15 (2)	59
	16 (2)	60
	17 (2)	65
	18 (2)	66
	19 (2)	67
	20 (2)	71
	21 (2)	72
	22 (2)	76
File = 19/10/2011	23 (2)	85
20/10/2011	24 (2)	98
	25 (2)	99
	26 (2)	101
	27 (2)	102
	28 (2)	111
	29 (2)	115
	30 (2)	132
	31 (2)	137
	32 (2)	139	Extra Banksia
	33 (3)	140	Extra Banksia
	34 (2)	155
	35 (3)	157
	36 (2)	158
	37 (2)	159
	38 (2)	160
File = 20/10/2011	39 (2)	162
21/10/2011	40 (2)	174
	41 (2)	203(a)
	42 (2)	203(b)
	43 (2)	211
	44 (2)	213
	45 (2)	219	Extra Black boy
	46 (2)	220	Black Boy detail
	47 (2)	222
	48 (2)	223
	49 (2)	224
	50 (2)	225
	51 (2)	226
File = 21/10/2011	52 (2)	227
Finish

 *I have photocopies of the catalogue that details the provenance for each specimen number. I will get extras photos for specimen from coastal WA, to round-out the collection.

I finished at NHM at 3.30 (not as Jetlagged today) and walked back to Pembridge Hall across Hyde Park in the sunshine. A large number of people and children in the Park, particularly at Princess Dianna's memorial playground.  As part of my walk I called into the Albert Hall ticket office but all the seats for the 7.0 pm concert were gone, and I was warned that the "standing room" tickets would be sold quickly on the night. [But I got the exact instructions for "queing" for a standing room place in case I needed it.]