Natural History

Alexander Marshal

Alexander Marshal (c.1620 – 7 December 1682 in London) was an English entomologist, gardener and botanical artist, noted for four albums of paintings, including the florilegium he compiled, consisting of some 160 folios of plants cultivated in English gardens, and finally presented to George IV in the 1820s. Marshal belonged to a coterie of gentleman gardeners from London, who cultivated and studied rare plants. These previously unknown species were introduced to England from the Near East and the New World in the 1600s. Marshal worked on his florilegium for some thirty years, and despite his not being a professional artist, his book boasts some of the most pleasing images in botanical art - it is now part of The Royal Collection, at the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. The plates depict more than 600 plant species, and detailed studies of insects, birds and mammals. It is notable as being the only known surviving florilegium by an English artist from the 1600s. Samuel Hartlib, the German polymath, wrote that Marshal had by 1650 produced a florilegium for the botanist and gardener John Tradescant the Younger. It was catalogued as "A Book of Mr Tradescant's choicest Flowers and Plants, exquisitely limned in vellum, by Mr. Alex. Marshal", by the Musaeum Tradescantianum in 1656 and is now lost. Another album, of thirty-three paintings on vellum, is in the British Museum. Though long known as a botanical illustrator, his talent in depicting insects only came to light in 1980. His album of 63 folios has 129 watercolours of a variety of insects – butterflies, moths, caterpillars, beetles, locusts, spiders, flies, and crickets – some by other artists. it is now in the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, in Philadelphia. On the reverse side of his drawings are notes in his own hand, providing much autobiographical material. Marshal described his Lepidopterid subjects in meticulous detail. He enlisted the aid of Tradescant, and of his friend Henry Compton, Bishop of London, in acquiring many rare, exotic insects. Marshal was described as an accomplished painter of flowers and fruit in Sir William Sanderson's Graphice of 1658. His experimenting with pigments led to their being extracted from flowers, berries, gums, and roots, as well as verdigris and arsenic. He painted for the pleasure it gave to him and his horticulturist friends.

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See also

• ▸Gull
• ▸Blandfordia cunninghamii
• ▸Etosha National Park

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Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.