Ferdinand Bauer was born in Feldsberg, Austria, in 1760. His father was court painter to the Count of Lichtenstein, who unfortunately died when Ferdinand was only one year old. His eldest brother followed in his father’s footsteps, but he and two other brothers, Joseph and Franz, were taken in by the Prior of the monastery at Feldsberg, who was a physician and botanist, and who trained them in the art of botanical illustration. Both Franz and Ferdinand excelled at this, and they were sent on to Vienna to work at the Royal Botanical Garden at the Schonbrunn Palace.
It was here that Bauer was recommended as a botanical illustrator to the Oxford Professor of Botany, John Sibthorp, whose family estate was at Instow, and who was on his way to Greece and Asia Minor to make a comprehensive record of the flora and fauna of that part of the world. They returned to England in 1787, with over 1500 sketches of plants, animals, birds and landscapes of the area, of which 966, all beautifully hand-coloured, were used in a twenty-volume study, called the ‘Flora Graeca’, and which Joseph Hooker, the famous scientist, described as “the greatest botanical work that has ever appeared.”
At some point, John and Ferdinand returned to Instow, where the latter was commissioned to execute a series of paintings of Instow, largely of the houses on the Sibthorp Instow estates. John invited Ferdinand on another European trip, but Ferdinand declined, as he felt that John had treated him as a servant, rather than a fellow professional, on the first trip. John died soon after returning home from this second trip, when he caught a cold, which developed into consumption, but he had left enough money in his will to make sure that the ‘Flora Graeca’ project came to fruition.
Ferdinand, on the other hand, went on to accomplish even greater things. In 1801, he travelled with Captain Matthew Flinders, aboard HMS Investigator, to newly-discovered Australia, as botanical draughtsman, on an expedition to circumnavigate the continent.. In 1805, he returned with 11 cases of drawings, containing nearly 2000 illustrations of the flora and fauna of Australia and nearby islands.
Part of Ferdinand’s technique was to draw the plant first, then colour-code it, so that he could paint the detail in at his leisure. The Admiralty continued to pay him a pension after his return, so that he could produce the “Flora of New Holland’, which took five years to complete.
Some time after this, he made another visit to Instow, probably at the invitation of Colonel Humphrey Waldo Sibthorp, John’s older half-brother, who had since become Lord of the Manor, and who had built a large new house, ‘Marino’, on the seafront, and which he commissioned Ferdinand to paint. This thus completed a series of paintings of Instow by Bauer, which remains in the possession of the Tapely Estate. (The house later became the Marine Hotel, which has now been converted into a block of flats.)
The “Flora” was not a commercial success, however, and Ferdinand returned to his native Austria, where he continued working as a botanical illustrator, making regular trips to the Alps in search of specimens, right up to his death in 1826, when he died of dropsy.
Although a short biographical sketch of him by John Lhotsky appeared in 1843, predicting that he would be long-remembered by posterity, he was almost forgotten for more than a century, partly because his work never reached a large audience, but also because he was generally too busy to promote his own work. However, at the time of Australia’s bicentenary in 1988, a major exhibition of his work took place at the Australian Museum. This was the first time that his work became known to the general public, and his reputation as, perhaps, the world’s greatest botanical illustrator was re-established.
Most of his painted illustrations are now housed in the British Museum. A genus of plants, Bauera, was named after him, and Flinders named Cape Bauer in South Australia after him.
The irony is that for all the thousands of sketches he made, no-one ever made a sketch of him, although a commemorative plaque of him and his brother, Franz, can be found in Kew Gardens, where his brother followed an equally illustrious career.
Chris Trigger
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