Ferdinand Bauer
Ferdinand Bauer (1760-1826) is generally recognised as the finest botanical artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries
“…nature is revealed, art concealed, great in its precision, gentle in its execution, decisive and satisfying in its appearance”.
Johanne Wolfgang von Goethe, 1817
Ferdinand Bauer was appointed Natural History Draughtsman, on the recommendation of Sir Joseph Banks, to Captain Matthew Flinder’s circumnavigation of Australia in HMS Investigator (1801-1803).
As an obsessive perfectionist, Ferdinand Bauer engraved his own plates from his own watercolours and then printed, coloured and published his own work.
‘It is’, wrote Sir Joseph Banks, ‘beyond what I thought it possible to perform’.
A limited edition of 50 complete sets of 46 watercolour drawings of animals, from the Flinder’s voyage, have been hand-printed, one-at-a-time, by the stochastic process. This boxed collection is presented in a solander library case with gold embossed spine label. The collection can also be bound into a single book upon request. Please contact us to ask for more details about binding.