Botanical Hand-Colored Engraving of Palmyra Palms, Georg Eberhard Rumphius, 1741-50

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Description

Hand-Colored Engraving of the Palmyra Palm
Georg Eberhard Rumphius, Herbarium Amboinense, edited by Johannes Burman
Amsterdam, 1741–1750
Decad. 10, Pl. … Read more Hand-Colored Engraving of the Palmyra Palm
Georg Eberhard Rumphius, Herbarium Amboinense, edited by Johannes Burman
Amsterdam, 1741–1750
Decad. 10, Pl. IV

A striking hand-colored copper engraving depicting the Palmyra palm (Borassus flabellifer), from the celebrated Herbarium Amboinense of Georg Eberhard Rumphius. The composition presents two tall palms with their characteristic fan-shaped crowns rendered in rich green, their ringed and spiny trunks rising from the lower pictorial field. Below and between them spreads a fruiting branch (Fig. A and B) laden with clusters of small round red berries, and a further detached fruiting spray (Fig. C), providing a complete botanical account of the species in flower and fruit.

The Palmyra palm — a species of enormous economic and cultural importance across South and Southeast Asia, yielding sugar, toddy, timber, and leaf material for writing and weaving — is treated here with the combination of scientific exactitude and pictorial vitality that distinguishes the finest plates of the series. Hand-colored copies of the Herbarium Amboinense are considerably rarer than the uncolored state.

The plate is inscribed with the pre-Linnaean synonym Lontarus Sylvestris seu Lontar Ulan, with the Rumphius citation vol. 1, p. 56, T. 11, and the binomial Borassus flabellifer.

Dimensions
21½ inches (54.6 cm) high by 17½ inches (44.5 cm) wide by 1 inch (2.5 cm) deep, framed.

Provenance
Framed by Trowbridge in London, July 22, 2022 (label on reverse).
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Historical Context
Georg Eberhard Rumphius (1627–1702) spent fifty years on the island of Amboina in the Moluccas as a botanist for the Dutch East India Company, cataloguing the flora of the Indonesian archipelago with extraordinary thoroughness despite going blind in 1670 and suffering the destruction of his manuscript in a catastrophic fire in 1687. His Herbarium Amboinense — published posthumously in Amsterdam between 1741 and 1750 under the editorship of Johannes Burman, director of the Amsterdam Botanic Garden — remains the foundational reference for the botany of the Moluccas and a landmark of eighteenth-century natural history illustration.

The work appeared in six bilingual Dutch and Latin volumes, issued in parts known as decades (groups of ten plates), each inscribed with Rumphius's own references alongside the Linnaean binomial nomenclature introduced in Species Plantarum (1753).

(Ref: NY11182-iprx) See less