Ferdinand Bauer's Natural History Drawings

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he forty-six plates in this first edition of Ferdinand Bauer’s illustrations of mammals, birds, fishes and reptiles, gathered from all round the coastline of Australia on Matthew Flinders’ epic voyage, will comprise all fifty-two of the finished drawings (forty-six in water-colour, six in pencil) in the collection of The Natural HistoryMuseum, London.

Several of the drawings are the first scientific illustrations of a particular species; none has previously been published in facsimile.

The lithographs will be hand-printed, one colour at a time, by the stochastic process and the edition will be limited to fifty complete sets, numbered 1/50 to 50/50, with an additional ten sets hors commerce, numbered HC I/X to HC X/X.

Artistic Apprenticeship

He was the youngest of three gifted brothers. The elder Josef Anton (1756 - ?), succeeded his father as court painter and inspector of the Liechtenstein Galleries in Vienna; Franz Andreas (1758-1840), who like Ferdinand became a protégé of Sir Joseph Banks, was appointed botanical artist at Kew Gardens in 1790, a position he retained until his death fifty years later.

Ferdinand’s early training as a natural history draughtsman was gained at Feldberg, under the guidance of Norbert Boccius (1729-1806). As well as being prior of the monastery, Boccius was a qualified medical man with strong botanical interests and all three brothers developed their artistic skills working on Boccius’ still unpublished series of 2750 botanical miniatures. Ferdinand was only fifteen when he contributed his first drawing.

In about 1780 Franz and Ferdinand moved to Vienna to work for Baron Nicolaus von Jacquin (1727-1817), Professor of Botany and Chemistry at Vienna University and one of the greatest botanists of the age as well as being an accomplished artist. It was Jacquin who fostered both brothers’ extraordinary talent for observation by introducing them to microscopic work, so that they were able to master the art of accurately portraying even the minutest detail.

Whilst in Vienna Ferdinand was invited by Dr. John Sibthorp, Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford University, to accompany him on the 1786-87 expedition to Greece which produced the first studies for the ten volumes of the Flora Graeca. Sibthorp made a second expedition in 1794, but Ferdinand remained in Oxford completing the illustrations - some 1000 water-colours of plants, 363 of animals and 131 landscapes - on which he was still working when he was selected by Sir Joseph Banks to be the natural history draughtsman on HMS Investigator.

The Flinders Voyage

The 334-ton sloop HMS Investigator set sail from Spithead on 18 July 1801 with a crew of 88. They carried provisions for 18 months which included a plentiful supply of lime juice and sauerkraut against the dreaded scurvy as well as a quantity of livestock - pigs, goats, fowls, hunting dogs and two cats, Van and the redoubtable Trim, the captain’s cat now immortalised in a statue outside the Mitchell Library in Sydney.

In addition to Ferdinand Bauer, the scientific party was made up of Robert Brown (1773-1858), Banks’ librarian and later the first Keeper of the Botanical Department in the British Museum, a nineteen-year old topographical and figure artist, William Westall (1781-1850), Peter Good (d. 1803) the ‘gardener’, charged with bringing back living plants and seeds and John Allen (b. 1775) ‘a practical miner’. An astronomer, John Crosley, fell ill at the Cape of Good Hope and had to return home.

Although Bauer had already turned forty and was nearly twice as old as anyone else on board, including the captain, he seems to have been chosen by Banks as one of his ‘men of science’ without a moment’s hesitation. This no doubt reflected the fact that work on the Flora Graeca had established his position in England and a good illustrator was highly prized.

One of the detailed instructions given to Flinders was to discover whether or not Australia was a single land mass, there seeming always the possibility that it might be divided into two or more vast islands by north-south straits extending from the Gulf of Carpentaria to the Great Australian Bight. The selection of the Investigator was a direct result of this instruction. Like Captain Cook’s ship the Endeavour, the Investigator started life as an east-coast collier with a shallow draught and rounded bottom which made it ideal for the close inshore work which detailed surveying entailed. Unfortunately before being refitted for the Flinders voyage, the Investigator had been converted to a 16-gun warship by the Navy and the placements of the gunports in this previous existence had considerably weakened her timbers. The resulting chronic leaks had a disastrous effect on the expedition.

After stops at Madeira and the Cape of Good Hope, the Investigator reached Cape Leeuwin, on the south-west coast of what is today Western Australia, on 6 December 1801. In the following five months Flinders worked his way slowly along the south coast. They put ashore at numerous places, including the sites of modern Albany, Adelaide and Melbourne, to further the surveying work and to give the naturalists opportunities to collect specimens — one of which, a live Wombat from King Island in the Bass Strait, survived for two years after their return to England.

By the time the Investigator reached Port Jackson (Sydney) on 9 May 1802 she was badly in need of repair and the ten-week stay enabled Bauer and the ‘men of science’ to make several excursions inland, to Richmond, Parramatta and North Rock and one, helped by a guide, to the foot of the Blue Mountains.

Writing from Sydney to Sir Joseph Banks, Robert Brown reported that Bauer had already made 350 plant sketches and 100 of animals and that ‘he has indeed been indefatigable’. In a separate letter to Banks, Flinders sings the praises of both Brown and Bauer. ‘It is fortunate for science that men of such assiduity and abilities as Mr Brown and Mr Bauer have been selected. Their application is beyond what I have been accustomed to see.

On 22 July 1802 Flinders sailed from Sydney to explore the east and north coasts on his way home to England. Having navigated through the Great Barrier Reef into the open Pacific by what came to be called ‘Flinders’ Passage’— a feat requiring strong nerves and highly skilful seamanship — the expedition reached the Gulf of Carpentaria in late October where three months were spent surveying the coasts round to Arnhem Bay.

But the Investigator was still leaking badly and on further inspection the condition of the ship was found to be so alarming that Flinders saw that he would have to go back to Sydney. Not daring to return down the east coast during the monsoon season that was just about to begin, he decided to end the survey of the north coast and sail on. Thus the Investigator came to be the first ship to complete the circumnavigation of Australia.

The end of the expedition was tragic for Flinders. On their return to Sydney the Investigator was condemned as ‘unfit to proceed to sea’, the crew were paid off and Flinders made arrangements to sail to England to obtain another ship. He left Sydney on 10 August 1803 but was forced to return after the wreck of the Porpoise on the Barrier Reef. He sailed again on 20 September 1803 on the Cumberland but because of the renewed hostilities between England and France was taken prisoner by the French at Mauritius. He was not released for six-and-a-half years and did not reach England till 24 October 1810. Flinders’ monumental work A Voyage to Terra Australis was published the day before he died on 19 July 1814.

Both Brown and Bauer remained in Australia awaiting Flinders’ return and eventually sailed for England in the repaired, but still leaking, Investigator landing at Liverpool on 13 October 1805.

Recording the Collections

Ferdinand brought back more than 2,000 exquisitely detailed pencil drawings from Australia, annotated with a four-digit colour code which enabled him to reproduce the finest nuances of colour with absolute accuracy. ‘It is’, marvelled Sir Joseph Banks, ‘beyond what I thought it possible to perform’.

The fact that very few of these sketches were worked up into finished portraits in Australia was undoubtedly partly due to the pressure of work as new specimens were gathered. But it was also the result of an unforeseen side effect of the Investigator's leaky condition: because of the dampness and warmth of the cabin, Ferdinand’s drawing paper ‘became covered with spots of mould and could not be painted on.’

Immediately after his return to England, Ferdinand began to prepare the drawings for publication, starting with the botanical specimens which were to accompany Robert Brown’s unillustrated Prodromus Iliustrationes Florae Novae Holiandiae, published in 1810.

Sadly the project was never completed. For a start the work proceeded extremely slowly. Ever the perfectionist, Ferdinand could not find anyone to match his standard of workmanship and engraved, printed and coloured each plate himself. In addition he took on the task of selling the publication but, despite his best efforts, the climate in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars was not right for such a grand enterprise. By 1813, only fifteen plates (three Parts) had been issued and no more than twenty-three names had been added to the subscription list. Ferdinand was forced to abandon the project and return to Vienna, taking with him his huge collection of pencil drawings which are now housed, still unpublished, in the Natural History Museum in Vienna.

The finalised water-colours of both flora and fauna remained in England, under Robert Brown’s care. They finally came into the possession of the British Museum on Brown’s death in 1858, together with the fifteen plates for Ferdinand’s Iliustrationes which were kept, still wrapped in their nineteenth-century paper, with the 743 unpublished plates for Sir Joseph Banks’ Florilegium. In 1990, after completing the publication of Banks’ Florilegium, the present publishers brought out a limited edition of thirty-five sets of these superb stipple engravings in Ferdinand’s honour. It was an immediate sell-out.

A strong case can be made for regarding Ferdinand Bauer as the greatest natural history artist the world has known. His natural history drawings have an almost legendary reputation and have been praised by many authors but, apart from a privileged group of scholars and researchers, the original work has remained virtually unseen.

The publishers are convinced that this lithographic edition of his drawings of Australian mammals, birds, fishes and reptiles, printed by the stochastic process, would have met the critical approval of even the fastidious and indefatigable Mr Bauer. Combining the most advanced digital technology with old fashioned hand printing on a flat-bed press, stochastic lithography not only allows the production of near perfect facsimiles of the original work, it also creates a completely accurate and permanent digitised colour record which can be used for study and enjoyment in electronic form in conjunction with the lithographs.

Over 180 years after the Investigator sailed from England, the publisher is proud and honoured to be able to put in hand the completion of Ferdinand’s grand design to publish the complete scientific and artistic record of the natural history specimens gathered on that great adventure.

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