LECTURE

PARADISE TRANSPLANTED Series
Organised by Dr Jennifer Gunning; sponsored by Buro Happold

BANKS’FLORILEGIUM

A Lecture by Joe Studholme on 11 June 1998

Joe Studholme, Chairman and Managing Director of Editions Alecto Group, established his print-making business whilst still an undergraduate in 1959. He is also Regional Chairman of the National Trust in Wessex.

To an enthralled audience the speaker recounted how a series of chance encounters and a mixture of inspiration, determination and dogged labour over twenty-five years finally resulted in the publication in 1990 of Banks' Florilegium, completing a work begun 220 years before.
He divided his illustrated talk into three parts beginning with a vivid account of Captain James Cook’s first voyage to the South Seas (1768--1771). Then he introduced Joseph Banks, landowner, self-taught botanist and member of the Royal Society, who joined the expedition with his botanist friend Daniel Carl Solander, favourite pupil of the great Linnaeus, and Sydney Parkinson, a naturalist and gifted draughtsman. Finally he unfolded the saga of the rescue of Parkinson’s copper plates and the water colour drawings.
Joe Studholme saw Cook’s voyage as one of the great epic adventures of history. Cook, an experienced naval surveyor and astronomer, was sent by the Royal Society with the support of the Admiralty and a donation from George III of £4000 to observe from Tahiti the Transit of Venus to establish the exact distance between the earth and the sun. Cook was also secretly instructed by the Admiralty to search for the Terra Australis Incognita while, in the course of his circumnavigation, observing the climate and nature of the soil, the animals, birds and fishes, also minerals and food plants for their economic possibilities.
Aged 25, Banks was good looking, rich, confident and dedicated to science. He had offered himself as a supernumary at his own expense (£10,000) along with his scientific party of six others, all their equipment and two greyhounds. Despite the differences in their background and experience he and Cook sailed for three years in perfect amity in the Endeavour, an ex-collier of 109ft with a complement of 93.
The well documented events and achievements of Cook’s voyage were vividly outlined by Joe Studholme. The astronomical observations were completed and Banks’ party collected, preserved and described over 30,000 specimens. Sadly, Parkinson, along with several others, died of fever in Batavia but he had finished 264 botanical drawings out of just over 900 field sketches.
On the expedition's triumphant return in July 1771, the work of preparing for publication began under Banks' meticulous guidance and at his own expense. The engravers alone cost £7000 (£1,000,000 today). First, artists worked up the coloured sketches to make a total of 748 finished drawings. Then 18 engravers over 13 years made extremely high quality copperplate engravings of the plant portraits - yet nothing was published. Banks' finances had begun to suffer from the slump in the wool trade following the American war, and his generosity to other scientists. He was also by then a very active President of the Royal Society, added to which Solander had died without quite completing the text to accompany the engravings.
Banks died without heirs in 1820. His Herbarium, the engraved plates and Solander's papers eventually passed to the Natural History Museum in London where they were forgotten.
Joe Studholme described Dr William Stearn's rescue of the copper plates from being melted down during the last War, the trigger to the whole enterprise, and the decision to print using the French multi-coloured single plate a la poupée technique. The existing plates were restored and new ones made from the field sketches which were found in their original 18th century wrappings at the Natural History Museum. A moving population of 80 printers and colourists led by Edward Egerton-Williams revived the long forgotten processes. Colours were ground and mixed in a multitude of shades: 343 different greens were made. Two typographers, two editors and a researcher designed and prepared the text. Subscribers were found for the 100 sets at £150,000 each, published in 35 volumes, hand printed between 1980 and 1990.
Joe Studholme's re-creation of the sense of privilege to be working on something of such quality as the Florilegium and having a direct connection with two of the great figures of the l8th century was wonderfully conveyed to his engrossed audience. As one reviewer said, “it is a debt magnificently discharged to the memory of Joseph Banks, to Solander and Parkinson and his engravers.”

Footnote The Florilegium may be seen at a few libraries including the City Library in Cardiff and the Botany Library of the Natural History Museum which also allows the contents of Banks’ own diary and Herbarium, Parkinson’s sketches and water colours, and the Florilegium to be seen and handled.
Jane Coates