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Ferdinand Lucas Bauer (1760 - 1826)
Fifty-two drawings of animals
observed in Australia between 1801 and 1803 during the voyage of HMS
Investigator, under the command of Captain Matthew Flinders |
The Investigator Voyage
When
the British Government commissioned Matthew Flinders (1774-1814) in
January 1801 to take command of the Investigator and undertake a survey
of the Australian coastline, it sent with him a party of scientists and
artists to make natural history observations of the places visited. The
members of the party were chosen on the advice of Sir Joseph Banks,
President of the Royal Society and director of the Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew. They included Robert Brown, a medical practitioner and
botanist, and Ferdinand Lucas Bauer, a Viennese artist who was to work
under Brown's supervision. |
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Ferdinand Lucas Bauer was a son of the court painter to the Prince of
Liechtenstein. He was born in Feldsberg (now Valtice in the Czech
Republic), but then a small town north of Vienna, in Austria, on 20
January 1760. In around 1780 work took Bauer to Vienna where he was
employed as botanical artist to Baron Nicolaus von Jacquin, the
Professor of Botany and Chemistry at Vienna University. In Vienna Bauer
met Dr John Sibthorp, an English gentleman botanist and the Sherardian
Professor of Botany at the University of Oxford, in 1784. Sibthorp was
on his way to Greece and the Levant in search of the medicinal plants
first described by Dioscorides in the first century anno domini. Bauer
joined Sibthorp on the expedition in 1786 and was employed to draw and
paint the plants, landscapes and animals seen on the way. In 1787 when
the expedition was over, Bauer was persuaded to accompany Sibthorp back
to Oxford taking the 1500 sketches he had made with him. There, from
December 1787 until 1794, under Sibthorp's direction, Bauer produced
watercolours for the 966 plates in Flora Graeca, (1806-1840), one of the
botancial masterpieces of all time. Meanwhile, as Ferdinand Bauer was
employed at Oxford his elder brother, Franz Andreas Bauer (1758-1840),
an equally talented botanical artist, had joined the staff at Kew
Gardens in 1790 as botanical artist at an annual salary of £300. Franz
Bauer remained working at Kew for fifty years until his death in 1840.
Banks would have been well aware of the younger Ferdinand's work at
Oxford and, from 1794, in London, and in 1801 Banks offered him the
opportunity to travel to Australia, an offer which he gladly accepted at
a salary of 300 guineas per annum plus expenses. The Investigator sailed
from Spithead on 18 July 1801 and reached King George Sound (in
present-day Western Australia), on the south-western coast of Australia,
in December 1801. Between December 1801 and 1803 Bauer circumnavigated
Australia and visited Timor in 1803. At every landfall the civilian
party went ashore to explore the country and record their observations
of the local wildlife. These excursions were not without danger from
venomous animals, the Aborigines and other factors, and some crewmen
lost their lives. By 1803 Flinders had successfully completed his survey
and was ready to return to England. Flinders was concerned that the
condition of the Investigator had become unseaworthy and it was unsafe
to attempt to sail home in it. He left the Colony on another boat
intending to bring a replacement for the Investigator on which to take
the men back to England. Meanwhile, Bauer stayed in New South Wales from
June 1803-August 1804, and visited Norfolk Island for eight months from
August 1804 until March 1805. He then returned to Sydney and joined the
Investigator on 23 May 1805 for its homeward journey. The voyage ended,
four years after it commenced, on 13 October 1805 when the Investigator
(Flinders mission to commission another boat had been unsuccessful)
docked at Liverpool and Flinders, Bauer and Brown stepped ashore.
Although there are only fifty-two drawings in this collection they are
remarkable in several ways. Most apparent is the beauty of the living
animal Bauer has captured with fidelity in these striking pictures.
After seeing them eminent art historians have unhesitatingly described
Bauer as one of the world's greatest natural history painters. They are
not just pretty pictures of colourful exotic animals either. Many of the
animals were unknown to Europeans before Bauer painted them and they are
the earliest scientific records of their discovery. In the absence of
preserved specimens, at least three of the paintings have served as the
iconotype on which the first published names and scientific descriptions
are based. Potentially, some of the others also could have been the
basis for the first descriptions except that at the beginning of the
nineteenth century there were not enough knowledgeable people in England
to work on them. Over the next fifty years, as the British colony in
Australia prospered, more Europeans visited to explore and collect
specimens for the great European museums. Many of the same animals Bauer
had seen and painted were re-discovered, taken to Europe and, under more
favourable conditions, eventually named and described in scientific
publications.
These paintings were not produced during the Investigator voyage but in
a studio, sometime after Bauer returned to England in 1805, probably
around 1811-1813. The reason is described in a letter Bauer wrote to his
brother Franz dated 8 April 1803 when he was in Timor: “With regard to
Natural History I have, since we left Port Jackson [Sydney], made
sketches of 500 species of plants but only 90 of animals, mostly birds.
I have not completed anything and will not be able to do so either. The
paper which I took with me on this cruise has gone mouldy because of the
dampness and warmth of the cabin and is covered with spots of mould and
can no longer be painted on or used for any kind of painting”
(Norst:104). By the end of the voyage Bauer had a total of over 2000
pencil sketches of animals and plants. He annotated the sketches with
numbers, the numbers corresponding to an elaborate colour code. From the
303 zoological pencil sketches (Norst:68) and by reference to his colour
code Bauer produced the forty-six finished watercolour paintings and the
six pencil drawings in the collection, perhaps on a commission from the
Admiralty which had sent him to Australia. We can only guess that the
date Bauer painted them was around 1811 from the evidence of a watermark
date “1811” which is present in some of the drawing paper. The paintings
are unsigned and there are no manuscript annotations of any sort on
them. The collection was in the possession of the Lords Commissioners of
the Admiralty until 1843 when it was presented to The Natural History
Museum, London. None of the zoological drawings was published in any
contemporary account. Flinders, who had just finished writing an account
of the Investigator expedition before he died in 1814 - A Voyage to
Terra Australia, 1814 - did not include any of Bauer's zoological
drawings. It is only now, 200 years later, that they have all been
published for the first time, and in the original size, by Alecto
Historical Editions. Bauer did, however, publish a small number of his
Australian botanical paintings in a book he began entitled
Illustrationes Florae Novae Hollandiae (1813-17) but it proved to be a
personal and financial disaster for Bauer and he did not complete it.
Greatly disappointed, Bauer returned to Austria in 1814 taking the
pencil sketches with him. Most are now in the Naturhistorisches Museum
in Vienna. Bauer died in Austria in 1826. |
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