4-8-2015 London

4-8-2015 London (Tuesday)

NHM is open today and the weather is fine so I will walk through Hyde Park to Exhibition Rd then to the museum. Task today is to see the Bauer botany drawings that I missed and particularly the "extant" finished works from the Vienna drawings as published in:

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 

I would like to try for a one-to-one comparison, [that I was able to do with the tropical fish].

A comparison image, Diuris Emarginata [var Pauciflora] plate 180, was available and I photographed it using both intelligent auto and 'hand-held low-light'  settings on the Sony camera. It will be possible to transfer the numbers from the field-drawings published in Pignatti-Wikus to the coloured finished painting. A good result but that was the only corresponding plate available. I saw and photographed the other botanical specimens from WA that were in the collection.

The librarian Paul suggested looking at a folio that belonged to Sir Joseph Banks, which was a printed book of a limited number of Bauer's finished drawings. All plates were of botanical specimens with some mildew staining and pigment fading, i.e., has not been as well curated as the Natural History Museum archives. These are Bauer's finished etchings, some plain others "coloured", and are comparable to his finished drawings in the NHM archive. An interesting book but not really representative of his huge body of work. (Note the book was produced and signed by Bauer as a gift to Sir Joseph Banks, and had been handled by Sir Joseph Banks, so has an intrinsic historic gravitas.)  

So the bottom line was that with the Diuris plate I have a direct link to the Pignatti-Wikus et al paper so can use their initial coding for my thesis but also expand on it. A nice short paper and an appendix in the thesis/exegesis.

I was running out of puff by about 2.30-3 pm so started to pack-up. Another walk through the park to get back to my digs and maybe pick-up a pastry on the way. I will need to tabulate my photos against the NHM catalogue tomorrow.

Addendum. There was a problem with the time/date stamp on my photos. Obviously the battery had gone flat at some stage and the internal clock had become confused. Initially I suspected that the camera had kept taking photos although the memory card was full but a a quick check showed there was still space available. I went back checking the dates on my latest photos and they were labelled 2011. Problem solved; I used the set-up advice screen to reset the camera date/time. Unfortunately my watch is starting to play up as well; I reset it by the NHM clock but I will probably need a cheap replacement.