A brush with genius

Alexander Marshal-this country's first major botanical painter-deserves to be better known, writes Tiffany Daneff, after seeing his luminous originals in the Royal Collection

- Tiffany Daneff

HEE might have 500.lb. for his Picturary of flowers if hee would take it,' wrote Samuel Hartlib in 1654 of his friend Alexander Marshal, the keen gardener and painter who had devoted his life to painting the flowers in his own and his friends' gardens. These brilliant watercolours—of 600 different plants, native and exotic, as well as insects, birds and animals (including some remarkably awkward greyhounds)—represent the most important surviving work by Marshal, our first botanical artist. Shockingly, perhaps, it is also the only extant British Florilegium of the 17th century.

‘Holes left by a hungry caterpillar are rendered in detail, petals are painted where they fell’

Flower books were popular on the Continent, where they were a happy offshoot of the passion for collecting—being the only way one's treasures could be recorded. Indeed, the use of the word 'Florilegium' to mean a book of flower paintings was coined by the Flemish artist Adriaen Collaert (1560–1618) in 1590. Marshal, who was fluent in French, possibly grew up in France, where many flower painters worked. He might well, therefore, have seen the works of Daniel Rabel (1578–1637) and been inspired by the way the Frenchman decorated his flowers with insects and butterflies. Rabel's countryman Nicolas Robert (1614–85), who produced the Vélins du Roi—botanical paintings on vellum—for Louis XIV, was similarly prominent, but there was no major British player until Marshal.

Despite the high offer, it is fortuitous, perhaps, that Marshal didn't sell his Picturary as, after his death, the paintings eventually passed to his wife's nephew and, by a circuitous route, were presented to George IV. Today, they are safely stored in the Print Room at Windsor Castle, Berkshire, where COUNTRY LIFE was privileged to see them.