Francis Bauer: the first botanical illustrator at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew

Today is the anniversary of the death of Francis (Franz) Bauer FRS FLS at the age of 82, on 11th December 1840.

Francis Bauer was born an Austrian. He was born in in Feldsberg in Lower Austria (now Valtice in the Czech Republic) on 14 March 1758.  However he spent 50 years at Kew Gardens - illustrating plants.

​He visited London in 1788 when he was 30 and met Sir Joseph Banks who had a passion for botany and was extremely pleased to meet Bauer - probably at his home at 32 Soho Square.  He has by this time realised that finding a competent botanical painter was far more difficult than finding an engraver.

In 1789, Bank appointed Bauer as a natural history illustrator with an annual annuity for life of £300. Bauer subsequently settled permanently in Kew and became the first resident plant illustrator at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

​His title was the  'Botanick Painter to His Majesty' for his work at Kew Gardens. A subsequent complication was that his paintings were owned by the crown which gave them to the British Museum! They're now in the Natural History Museum - with just one orchid painting at Kew!  However the Natural History Museum has an excellent website where you can see many of them.

Thumbnails of works by Francis Bauer in the Natural History Museum

He is very well known for

• his use of the microscope to study and make meticulous and very impressive studies of dissections and pollen grains. He observed nuclei in plant cells in 1802 and began to study pollen diversity
• painting a number of illustrations of plants of the genus Strelitzia from South Africa  between 1818 - 1820
• his studies of orchids while working with John Lindley. He starts to publish Illustrations of Orchidaceous Plants in 1830. 
• his painted record of "Drawings of Plants Cultivated in the Royal Garden at Kew" (1790-1820) - which is now kept in four different institutions but with very little at Kew!

If you want to see very good reproductions of his paintings, I highly recommend The Bauers Joseph, Franz & Ferdinand: An Illustrated Biography by Hans Walter Lack (see end) which has excellent and large reproductions of his work in what is a very large, comprehensive and heavy book! I got my copy from the Bodleian bookshop when I went to see the exhibit of Ferdinand Bauer's colour scheme.

Top: orchid dissections and bottom studies of pollen cells and Taxus melanosporum, Yew

Bauer was elected a Fellow of the Linnaean Society in 1804.

He was also nominated for election to Fellowship of the Royal Society on 29 June 1820, just a few days after the death of Banks. Subsequently he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society on 8 February 1821 - which meant he was now a member of the "inner circle of natural scientists in England" as Hans Walter Lack describes it.

You can READ MORE about him on my dedicated page about him ​About Francis (Franz) Bauer FRS, FLS ​(1758 - 1840) - which also includes books I recommend.

He died at Kew on 11 December 1840 at the age of 82. Ironically this came some six months after the botanical gardens at Kew transferred from the Crown to the state on 25 June 1840.

If you ever go to Kew Gardens, you can see the grand monumental wall tablet erected inside St Anne's on Kew Green, the Kew Parish Church where he was buried next to Zoffany and Gainsborough.  It's midway down the left wall of the church - between the windows - as you stand at its entrance looking towards the alter. I visited recently as I knew it existed and had never seen it. I've yet to locate his grave in the churchyard where he is buried.

What I was surprised about is that the tablet is much bigger and grander than those afforded to the ones for William Hooker and his son Joseph Hooker who had both been Directors of Kew Gardens.

​The tablet has

• a very long eulogy carved into the stone which also pays tribute to his brother Ferdinand Bauer who died in 1826 (who at some point is getting a page on my website - it's nearly finished!). While Francis spent 50 years drawing plants at Kew, Ferdinand was the brother who travelled far and wide to document the plants which are his also very significant contribution to botanical art.
• above the eulogy there is a rounded pediment which encloses a roundel with a portrait profile of Bauer in old age.
• To left and right, there are carefully carved plants – broad-leaved on the left, ferny and with some flower at the top on the right (It looks somewhat like a bound banksia)
• beneath the carving includes a small microscope.

However it's evident that R. Westmacott Jr who carved the tablet was more used to the conventional tools attributed to other artists and has included the equipment of an oil painter at the base of the plaque rather than the kit of an artist who always worked in watercolours.

It's definitely worth a look if you should ever get to Kew.

(PS I was tickled pink to find that there are also a number of significant wall tablets for the Tyrrell family in the church - who have a side chapel all of their own!)

REFERENCE:

• About Francis (Franz) Bauer FRS, FLS ​(1758 - 1840)
• ​Kew Church Monuments

from Amazon UK

• The Bauers Joseph, Franz & Ferdinand: An Illustrated Biography (Hardback, 528 pages, 22.4 x 4.6 x 31.8 cm) This book is big and very heavy. I have to think twice about where to put it before opening it - it's certainly not one for resting on your knee for long!
• The Orchid Paintings of Franz Bauer

From Amazon.com

• The Bauers: Joseph, Franz & Ferdinand: Masters of Botanical Illustration 
• The Orchid Paintings of Franz Bauer