c.1900 Herbarium Album With 26 Specimens, Hand-Drawn Studies & Calligraphic Manuscript

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Description

An exceptional turn-of-the-century herbarium and botanical manuscript album, attributed to Paul Benninghofen of Hamilton, Ohio, beautifully interweaving 26 pressed botanical … Read more An exceptional turn-of-the-century herbarium and botanical manuscript album, attributed to Paul Benninghofen of Hamilton, Ohio, beautifully interweaving 26 pressed botanical specimens, 26 flowing handwritten ink manuscript note pages, and 12 hand-drawn graphite botanical studies in one intact burgundy cloth-covered album with Japanese-style side-sewn cord binding. Botanical subjects include dogwood, rose-family blooms, lilac, daffodil, trillium, pawpaw, grape, maple, mock orange, geranium, violet, buttercup, waterleaf, monkeyflower, and other woodland, garden, vine, shrub, and native plant forms.

The album has the atmosphere of a private natural-history archive: preserved flowers and leaves laid against warm antique paper, graceful ink handwriting, original graphite studies of plant structures, and beautiful tissue ghosts left by specimens long pressed between the pages. Many specimens retain striking color for their age, including deep olive greens, warm russet petals, ochre blossoms, faded rose, soft mauve, sepia stems, and occasional flashes of violet and blue.

The Benninghofen connection gives the album a particularly strong provenance. The family’s historic Hamilton residence still stands as the Benninghofen House Museum, now operated by the Butler County Historical Society. The society describes the house as a High Italianate-style home filled with Victorian-era furnishings, and notes that the family lived there continuously after John W. Benninghofen purchased it in 1874. Paul Benninghofen later served as president of the Butler County Historical Society from 1951 to 1953, and as chairman of its board of trustees from 1956 to 1974.

The handwriting and drawings are central to the album’s beauty. The note pages are densely written in a fluid period hand, recording plant families, structures, classifications, and distinguishing characteristics, including period botanical terminology such as phanerogamous, monocotyledonous, angiospermous, and polypetalous divisions. The 12 graphite studies add a rare human layer, with careful observations of leaves, stems, blossoms, floral anatomy, seed forms, and plant details.

Offered intact, the album is a commanding object for a library, study, garden room, academic interior, or cabinet-of-curiosities collection. It can be displayed closed, opened on a book stand to a favorite specimen, or rotated through its specimens, manuscript pages, and drawings.

For a designer, collector, or framer, the possibilities are extraordinary. With 26 specimen pages, 26 handwritten ink note pages, 12 original graphite botanical studies, and atmospheric tissue-transfer details, the album contains enough material to create a full library-sized botanical gallery wall. The pages could be framed individually, paired as specimen-and-manuscript compositions, or arranged as a complete natural-history installation from one named archive.

A rare and highly decorative botanical manuscript object: part herbarium, part field notebook, part drawing album, and part preserved natural-history record.

A faint handwritten inscription on the opening page reads:

“Consider the lilies of the field,
how they grow: they toil
not, neither do they spin:
And yet I say unto you,
That even Solomon in all
his glory was not arrayed
like one of these.
Matthew VI. 28–9”

A complete page-by-page photo file is available for serious buyers upon request. See less