Elizabeth Blackwell (illustrator)
Elizabeth Blachrie Blackwell (* around 1700 in Aberdeen ; † 1758 in London ), born Elizabeth Blachrie, was a draftsman and engraver who created one of the most important illustrations of pre- Linnaeus botany with her depictions of plants in A Curious Herbal (1737–1739) . Your official botanical author abbreviation is “ Blackw. "
Live and act
Blackwell was the daughter of a well-to-do Scottish merchant and received instruction in drawing and painting in her youth. At the age of 28 she married her cousin Alexander Blackwell and settled with him in Aberdeen, where the husband opened a practice as a general practitioner. After doubts arose as to the validity of his license, the couple moved to London, where their husband tried his hand at printing and opened his own printing company without the legally required training and membership in the printers' guild. As a result, when a heavy fine was imposed and the printing works had to be closed, the couple, who had now also had a child, ran into large debts and Alexander Blackwell was held in custody as an insolvent debtor.
To find a way out of the economic hardship, Elizabeth Blackwell presented some of her drawings to the British physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane , who succeeded Isaac Rand on the presidency of the Royal Society and on his estates in Chelsea with the London Pharmacists' Guild and with Charles du Bois , Treasurer of the East India Company , maintained an important botanical garden, the Chelsea Physic Garden . Elizabeth Blackwell's drawing skills caught the interest of Sloane and his colleagues. With Sloane's support, the project of a botanical table was then developed, which should reproduce the most important plants for medical professionals and pharmacists, including the newly discovered plants of the two Americas , in lifelike illustrations.
Elizabeth Blackwell moved to Chelsea, where she made the drawings based on the living model of the plants in the Physic Garden, made the stitches and then colored them. The English plant names are given the Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, German and Dutch equivalents as well as abbreviations for which Joseph Miller's Botanicum Officinale (1722) is shown as the main source . Since Elizabeth Blackwell had no botanical training herself, the botanical information is said to have been provided by her husband from prison, but in fact it was much better to get in Chelsea, where Elizabeth Blackwell, among others, with the support of Isaac Rand, the curator of Physics Garden, could work.
1737–1739 the work was published by Samuel Harding in London in two folio volumes under the title A Curious Herbal Containing Five Hundred Cuts, of the most useful Plants which are now used in the Practice of Physick ( doi: 10.5962 / bhl.title.571 ) . Elizabeth Blackwell made it appear under her own name and preceded it, for scientific authentication, with a license to practice medicine signed by several well-known physicians and scientists.
The work was a great success because of the high quality of the drawings and the inclusion of foreign and exotic plants, even if it was not yet able to meet the requirements of Carl von Linné's systematics, which was received by experts at the time . From 1747/49, therefore, the Nuremberg doctor and pharmacist Christoph Jacob Trew published a revised German version with considerably expanded texts from Johann Joseph Fleischmann under the title Herbarium Blackwellianum emendatum et auctum ( doi: 10.5962 / bhl.title.567 ) , for which he reworked the botanical apparatus himself and had the draftsman and copperplate engraver Nikolaus Friedrich Eisenberger (1707–1771) redraw and engrave all the illustrations. This edition, in which Trew also consulted Leipzig professor Christian Gottlieb Ludwig and later other collaborators from the second volume for the botanical apparatus , grew to five volumes and was only able to add a sixth volume in 1773 to the ones that were missing or misrepresented by Blackwell Plants to be completed.
Elizabeth Blackwell's work was a great, also economic success, the income from which she was able to release her husband from prison. However, he soon got into debt again and went alone to Sweden in 1742, where he continued to receive support from his wife from her book income, and had some success as a doctor at the royal court, but was executed in 1748 for participating in a political conspiracy.
Little is known about Elizabeth Blackwell's own further fate. She died in 1758 and was buried in Chelsea Cemetery.
Web links
- Elizabeth Blackwell, the illustrator at the Deutsches Museum , Munich
- British Library Turning Pages Project
- Article by Huber M. Walsh, digitized from both editions, Missouri Botanical Garden Library, St. Louis, MO
- Digital copies from the Nuremberg edition, Aboca Museums in Sansepolcro, Italy
- Contract for the Rights to A Curious Herbal between John Nourse and Alexander and Elizabeth Blackwell, Oct. 2, 1740
Individual evidence
- ↑ Botanical author abbreviation of the IPNI
- ↑ Chelsea Physic Garden website
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Blackwell, Elizabeth |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Blachrie, Elizabeth (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Scottish draftsman, illustrator and engraver |
| DATE OF BIRTH | around 1700 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Aberdeen |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1758 |
| Place of death | London |