Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden celebrated at Sydney Museum exhibitions

Two exhibitions celebrate the bicentenary of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden and the art of science.

Cut-leaf Banksia by Margaret Pieroni, from Florilegium: Sydney’s Painted Garden.

We tend to assume that art and science are not only quite different but even antithetical activities. One is concerned with facts, the other with feelings; one is utilitarian, the other free and disinterested. This is nowhere more apparent than in the spectacular and intentionally eccentric architecture of contemporary art museums, from the Federation Square complex in Melbourne at the lower end of the range to the new Louis Vuitton museum in Paris at the upper end.

Almost all contemporary art museums are intended to be monumental, but above all they implicitly claim to represent freedom and imagination, values that transcend the world of constraint and necessity. But one can hardly fail to see how the non-utilitarian style of such edifices is the mirror-image, and perhaps like escapist mass entertainment the inevitable consequence, of an increasingly depersonalised and ruthless economic reality.

The split between art and science is some two centuries old, broadly going back to the romantic movement, or what Kenneth Clark aptly called the romantic rebellion. After the militant rationalism and utilitarianism of the Enlightenment and the social changes brought about by the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the romantics protested in the name of the imagination, the soul, and what would soon be called the unconscious mind.

Romantic art — to simplify a complex period — protested against the direction in which science was taking the modern world; but science paid no attention and drove relentlessly onward, like one of the new steam locomotives of the time. Art was left on the platform, complaining as the train left the station, and artists for the next two centuries grew accustomed to a marginal relation to society, giving rise to all the modern cliches of the artist as mad, disaffected and unappreciated.

Two watercolours by Gertrude Lovegrove, from The Artist and the Botanical Collector.

Of course these are essentially cliches, and many modern and contemporary artists have been, and currently are, comfortably part of the establishment. But artists in earlier centuries did not make the same assumptions at all and, more specifically, they did not envisage the project of art as being inherently different from that of what we now call science.

The Renaissance is the most remarkable illustration of this principle: at the dawn of what would become the scientific revolution, art and science were closely intertwined. Geometry underpinned the system of perspective in painting, and perspective in turn demonstrated the new objectivising gaze of the scientist.

The case of anatomy is even easier to understand. The Middle Ages had preserved the great anatomical and medical writings of Galen, but it was not until a millennium after the fall of the Roman Empire that modern medical knowledge could match that of antiquity and then gradually begin to surpass it. One of the problems was the lack of adequate illustrations to aid the understanding of the ancient texts.

Medical illustration in the first printed books of the late 15th and early 16th centuries are rudimentary and schematic. But at the same time, Leonardo da Vinci was engaged in his own anatomical research and documenting his dissections in what remain the most extraordinary anatomical drawings ever made. Nor did he limit himself to the study of bones and muscles that are useful to a painter of figures; his study of the body went as far as dissecting and illustrating the ventricles of the heart.

It was this work by artists, especially da Vinci and Michelangelo, that led a few decades later to Vesalius’s magnificent De humani corporis fabrica (1543), the first comprehensive atlas of human anatomy. In subsequent centuries, anatomical textbooks tended to be designed either for artists — limited to what is relevant to a painter or sculptor and including examples of ancient statues — or for medical practitioners. But it was still artists who did the work of illustration in each case.

Even today, anatomical textbooks use drawings and diagrams because they are clearer and easier to understand than photographs. And in other fields too, such as natural history in general or geology and botany in particular, drawings and paintings remain the most efficient and articulate way of conveying the most important information.

Botany has a special relevance to Australia, where the first British settlement was established at the height of the late-18th-century passion for the study of plants, when the Linnaean system allowed for a consistent and universal method of classification, and when the expanding reach of European trade and colonisation meant vast new worlds of flora were being discovered.

The city of Sydney was almost established in Botany Bay, named by Cook in 1770, before Arthur Phillip decided Port Jackson was a more suitable location. And the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney dates back to 1816, under governor Lachlan Macquarie, only a little more than a half century after the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (1759), where Joseph Banks gathered plants from around the world.

The 200th anniversary of the Royal Botanic Garden is celebrated with a pair of exhibitions at the Museum of Sydney, one of historical plant illustration in the later 19th century, the other of work by contemporary practitioners associated with the garden.

The smaller of the two exhibitions is devoted to the flower paintings of Gertrude Lovegrove (1859-1961), made in partnership with William Bauerlein (1840-1917), one of the less well-known of the remarkable group of German scientists who lived in Australia in the 19th century and seem to have dominated the intellectual life of Melbourne.

Bauerlein was collecting plants in the Shoalhaven area when he met Lovegrove, the daughter of a well-to-do and cultivated family; her mother was Melanie de Mestre, great-aunt of Roy de Maistre. She began to illustrate the flowers that Bauerlein collected, and they conceived an ambitious plan for a survey of the wildflowers of NSW in 25 volumes, of which the first was published in 1891. Bauerlein and Lovegrove sought subscriptions to fund the remainder of the publication, but unfortunately there was not enough interest and it was abandoned.

A copy of the rare first volume was found at Meroogal, a historic house in Nowra, and further research turned up the fine watercolours by Lovegrove, which are shown in the exhibition. Meroogal, which was built by the Thorburn family in the 1880s and is showing the Meroogal Women’s Art Prize exhibition until January, adds to the human dimension of the story, for Bauerlein also became very friendly with the Thorburns and there are vivid glimpses both of botanical collecting and of colonial life in the extracts from Tottie Thorburn’s diary that are included in the show.

Angela Lober’s Norfolk Pine and Annie Hughes’s Chilean Bell Flower, from Florilegium.

The larger of the two exhibitions is devoted to the Florilegium project of the Royal Botanic Garden, a collection of exquisitely painted botanical illustrations of flowers and other plants from the gardens that have been gifted to the collection by the artists. The paintings are all from the past decade or so, though the labels include the dates of first collection and of naming of each specimen, so we have the sense of a scholarly undertaking that extends over about two centuries and may never be complete.

There is also a short video about the history of plant collecting in recent centuries, and the garden designs that grew out of such collections. The late 18th and early 19th centuries, as already mentioned, had a passion for botany, and both improved seafaring and the growing network of British colonies encouraged the transfer of plants around the world. Not only were plants from the most distant nations brought back to Kew; they also migrated between colonial centres — trees and other plants travelling from Cape Town or Rio de Janeiro to Sydney, for example, and vice versa.

The influx of exotic flora, including the transplanting of subtropical and rainforest species, shaped the characteristic public and private gardens of Sydney. A certain style of garden design arose, known as the “gardenesque”. The term is clearly coined on the model of the earlier “picturesque”, but seems to imply a greater emphasis on artifice. On the one hand, plants are allowed to grow to their natural shape and size, in classic British tradition — as opposed to the French love of topiary and serried rows; on the other hand, they are set out as features and often planted with species of different origins.

The paintings, the main focus of the exhibition, are extremely finely executed but cannot be considered in quite the same way as flowers painted in the landscape or still life genres. On the one hand, there is an aesthetic limitation in the rigorous objectivity and precision required by botanical illustration. There is no room for moodiness, or even for distracting backgrounds or effects of light and shade. Absolute faithfulness to every detail of appearance is paramount.

Even context is removed: flowers in a botanical illustration cannot be in the ground or even set in a vase. The former would draw them towards the landscape genre, and the latter would make them into a still life: think of the two paintings of irises by Vincent van Gogh, one in the ground (1889, Getty Museum) and the other in a vase (1890, Metropolitan Museum).

Flowers in a botanical illustration, in contrast, occupy a non-space and exist in a vacuum. In one way this limits their affective presence, but in another sense it permits the rigorous clarity and focus that are required. As a consequence, they are more satisfactory when fully contained within the pictorial space, not cut off by the lower border of the picture as though they might still be growing in the ground.

There is a very good video of one of the artists, Angela Lober, painting a specimen of the Norfolk pine, which happens to be the first plant brought to the Botanic Gardens, and is now familiar from the handsome row of them that are planted along so many of our beaches. For readers who cannot get to the exhibition, the video can be seen online or on YouTube.

Lober is extremely skilful, meticulous and patient. Botanical art is not for lovers of impasto, let alone the palette knife, nor should it be ­attempted under the influence of any psychotropic substances. As we watch her paint, we realise it is really a kind of meditative practice. There is no room for ego: instead there is quietness and humility in submission to the complexity, beauty and wonder of natural forms.

This is not perhaps the way most people are used to thinking of the art of painting, ­especially today, but that is because it is a hybrid variety we seldom encounter in galleries: the art of science.

Florilegium: Sydney’s Painted Garden

Museum of Sydney. Until October 30.

The Artist and the Botanical Collector: The Lost Works of Lovegrove and Bauerlein

Museum of Sydney. Until November 20.