Banana Plant Hand-Colored Botanical Engravings, Pair, Pierre-Joseph Buc'hoz After Rumphius, Paris, 18th Century

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Banana Plant Hand-Colored Botanical Engravings, Pair, Pierre-Joseph Buc'hoz after Rumphius, Paris, 18th Century
1774–1780
Pierre-Joseph Buc'hoz, Histoire universelle du règne … Read more Banana Plant Hand-Colored Botanical Engravings, Pair, Pierre-Joseph Buc'hoz after Rumphius, Paris, 18th Century
1774–1780
Pierre-Joseph Buc'hoz, Histoire universelle du règne végétal, after Georg Eberhard Rumphius
Decad. 6, Pl. IX and Pl. X

This pair of hand-colored copper engravings depicts banana plants (Musa) and comes from Pierre-Joseph Buc'hoz's Histoire universelle du règne végétal, published in Paris between 1774 and 1780. Both images are redrawn from Georg Eberhard Rumphius's Herbarium Amboinense, which their captions cite directly, and both are colored in strong greens and yellows. The two were issued consecutively, as engraved at their upper corners: Pl. IX and Pl. X of Decad. 6.

Pl. IX shows the common banana or plantain as a full botanical study. The tall pseudostem rises from its roots and a young sucker to a crown of broad paddle leaves, and is surrounded by lettered details: A, a great hanging bunch ripening from green to yellow; B, a single hand; C, E and G, individual fruits; D, a fruit cut across to show its section; F, a fruit with three small seeds drawn above it; and H, the male bud at the tip of the fruiting stalk. The caption reads Musa paradisiaca linn. sp. plant. 1477. Musa Rumph. 5. p. 126. T. 60. Bananier.

Pl. X brings three kinds together on one plate. Fig. 1, the central plant, is captioned Musa simiarum Rumph. 5. p. 138. T. 61. Pissang jacki. Bananier des Singes. This is the monkey banana, shown with its leaves, a spray of flowers and a single fruit lettered A. Fig. 2, at the left, is captioned Musa troglodytarum linn. sp. plant 1478. Musa uranoscopus Rumph. 5. p. 137. T. 61. Bananier des moluques. Its bunch is held upright while the long stalk arches over so that the bud hangs down, the feature behind Rumphius's name uranoscopus, sky-gazer. Fig. 3, at the right, is Musa alphurica sive ceramica Rumph. 5. p. 150. T. 61. Pissang alphuru, with three hands on a pendant stalk ending in its bud.

Rumphius's upright-fruited banana is the Fe'i banana of eastern Indonesia and the Pacific, still recognized by its erect bunches. In 1917 the botanist Elmer Merrill designated Rumphius's illustration of Musa uranoscopus as the type of Musa troglodytarum, the name Linnaeus gave it and the one engraved here.

Each print is presented in a white double mat within a molded giltwood frame, the gilding worn to show the red bole beneath, with gray-painted fillets and a beaded inner slip.

The pair hangs well side by side over a console or sideboard, or one above the other in a narrow wall space, and suits a breakfast room, garden room or library.

Dimensions (each, framed)
Height: 21½ inches (54.6 cm)
Width: 17½ inches (44.5 cm)
Depth: 1 inch (2.5 cm)

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

References
Georg Eberhard Rumphius, Herbarium Amboinense, ed. Johannes Burman, vol. 5 (Amsterdam, 1747), pp. 126–150, tabs. 60–61 (the source images)
Carl Linnaeus, Species Plantarum, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Stockholm, 1763), pp. 1477–1478
Elmer D. Merrill, An Interpretation of Rumphius's Herbarium Amboinense (Manila, 1917)
Gordon Dunthorne, Flower and Fruit Prints of the 18th and Early 19th Centuries (Washington, 1938), no. 59
Claus Nissen, Die botanische Buchillustration (Stuttgart, 1951–1966), no. 287
Georg August Pritzel, Thesaurus Literaturae Botanicae, no. 1325
Wilfrid Blunt and William T. Stearn, The Art of Botanical Illustration (Woodbridge, 1994), pp. 175, 178–179

Historical Context
Pierre-Joseph Buc'hoz (1731–1807), also spelled Buchoz, was born in Metz and trained in law and medicine, taking his medical degree at Nancy in 1763. He served as physician to Stanislas Leszczyński, King of Poland and Duke of Lorraine, and later to Monsieur, brother of Louis XVI, and the comte d'Artois, and became one of the most prolific natural history publishers of the eighteenth century. His Histoire universelle du règne végétal, issued in parts with some 1,200 engraved plates and approved by the Académie des sciences, drew its images from many sources, among them the royal collection of paintings on vellum now in the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle and the great illustrated floras of the previous generation. Scientific botanists faulted his habit of reusing plates, but his decorative sense has long placed his books among the most appealing plant books of the period.

The source of these images, the Herbarium Amboinense, was the life's work of Georg Eberhard Rumphius (1627–1702), who spent nearly fifty years on Ambon in the Moluccas in the service of the Dutch East India Company. Despite losing his sight in 1670 and much of his work to fire in 1687, he completed his account of the island's flora, published posthumously in Amsterdam between 1741 and 1750 under the editorship of Johannes Burman. Buc'hoz's versions add the Linnaean names, cited by page from the second edition of Species Plantarum (1762–1763), bringing Rumphius's bananas into the binomial system.

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