Circle of Georg Dionysius Ehret Iris Watercolor, Mid-18th Century

Details

Description

Two irises, three hundred years old, and still the most alive thing in the room. This is a mid-eighteenth-century watercolor … Read more Two irises, three hundred years old, and still the most alive thing in the room. This is a mid-eighteenth-century watercolor and bodycolor drawing of the mourning iris, Iris susiana, paired with a blue English iris, after the composition Georg Dionysius Ehret painted in 1745.

The large upper flower is the strange one. Its broad falls are mottled all over in smoky gray, fawn, and dusky purple, the markings stippled in by hand, dot by dot, until they gather into a dark velvety throat. Below it the second iris is everything the first is not: a clear blue-violet, with a yellow-and-white crest and fine reddish-brown veining. Sword-shaped leaves run up from the base in a few fluid strokes, one or two of them withered and twisting. The white and pale-blue highlights are laid on in opaque bodycolor over the washes, which is what gives the petals their slight sheen and lift off the page.

It is drawn on one leaf of a folded double sheet and numbered 8 in pencil at the upper right, a number that sat hidden under the mount until recently. That, and the fold, tell you it once lived in a bound album of botanical drawings before somebody took it out and framed it. It is framed now in ornate giltwood over a deep blue mount, behind UV-protective museum glass, and the wide mount gives a small drawing real presence on a wall.

Hang it somewhere you pass close to rather than across a large room: over a writing desk, along a hallway, beside a bed, in a powder room or a small library. The gilt and the dark blue mount are enough to hold their own against paneling or a strong wall color, and the drawing itself is quiet enough to live with. It hangs handsomely on its own, or as the anchor of a group of smaller botanicals and prints.

Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708–1770) was the finest botanical draftsman of the eighteenth century. Born in Heidelberg and settled in England, he worked for the great naturalists and collectors of the day and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1757. His compositions were repeated and adapted by the accomplished hands working around him, and drawings of that kind form a recognized category of eighteenth-century flower painting. The original of this composition, dated 1745, is at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation.

Dimensions
Framed height: 22¼ inches (56.5 cm)
Framed width: 19¼ inches (48.9 cm)
Framed depth: 1½ inches (3.8 cm) See less