Cleveland Museum of Art

Large Flowering Sensitive Plant, Plate 16

Date

1799

Medium

Etching with printed and hand-applied color, aquatint, stipple, and engraving

Culture

England, late 18th-early 19th Century

Department

Prints

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

Fueled by scientific and colonial expeditions that brought back plant specimens from across the globe, the science of botany blossomed in Enlightenment Europe. This print is from a sumptuously illustrated treatise known as The Temple of Flora . Commissioned and published by Dr. Robert John Thornton, a British medical botanist, the work illustrates the new plant classification system of Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus. Yet while these prints realistically depict buds, flowers, and leaves, they show them in environments where they did not actually grow. Instead, Thornton had the artists situate specimens in imagined landscapes, often reminiscent of British colonial holdings, which he felt better suited the plants. In The Temple of Flora , this print was accompanied by a scientific description and a poem written by Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather).

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