Ars Botanica
Ars Botanica /a:rs bəutænikə/ n. Latin-derived for:
1. the arts of botanical science
2. the science of botanical illustration
3. the craft or process of botanical art production
4. the documentation of all the above, a visual genealogy of botanical art traditions at the interface between art and science
Botanical art, a genre poised between the worlds of Art and Science, has historical roots that run both ways -- toward beauty as well as utility, toward medieval flower paintings meant solely for pleasure as well as illustrated herbals and medicinals of antiquity meant to identify useful plants. And for as long as there have been these beautiful "plant portraits" in the service of empire or medicine or trade, there have been efforts to document them by region. From Renaissance florilegia (collections of flower illustrations from a specific garden) to colonial flora (botanical record of a specific place), these books gathered plant images on the page through exquisitely detailed engravings, watercolors, lithographs, or pen and ink drawings. Today, with botanical art disappearing by the archive, and trees, forests or entire ecosystems at the whim of a malicious executive order, it seems more urgent than ever to compile some of these dispersed art historical resources. To refigure the botanical archive. To document, collect and gather together the art that once came from particular botanical gardens; the illustrations that once sat together in bound volumes; the artists who painted these images. The goal here is to create an Ars Botanica; a garden of botanical art archives by region and by place. As the world's first globalizers, plants travel constantly and rarely sit still. Portraits of plants from a specific geographical location - an Ars Botanica - may be one way to trace and archive these journeys, to recontextualize them and bring them back home.
In the Indian context, these botanical arts are a small sub-genre of what art historians call Company School painting (or Kampani kalam in Hindi). Kampani style is a broad term for a variety of hybrid, Indo-European style of painting traditions that developed in India in the 18th and 19th centuries by Indian artists under the patronage of the East India Companies. But like all colonial archives in which archival 'remembering' can never be entirely separated from 'forgetting', art archives do not just construct, they also bury colonial pasts, just as they ignore indigenous communities whose knowledge constitutes these archives. And thus, while Kampani kalam is a useful category in some ways, it has recently been criticized for leaving out as much as it includes. By focusing on the Company corporate commissioner, it completely ignores the largely anonymous artists, native and European, who were the real creators of this art. Because early definitions of Kampani style tended to focus on artists trained in late Mughal or Rajput traditions, the label ignores the wide diversity of botanical art styles especially in South India, and the influences of the so-called 'lesser art traditions', such as textile art or woodcarving. And in the particular case of botanical art, it leaves out the Company gardens themselves as centers of artistic production.
Ars Botanica will address some of these gaps in the Indian botanical art archive - invisible artists, indigenous collectors, circulation of diverse art styles - from the point of view of three botanical gardens, each in a different plant geographical region and each of which produced an extraordinary botanical text:
From the late 17th century Malabar, Hortus Malabaricus, the Garden of Malabar
From the mid-19th century Calcutta region, Plants from the Coast of Coromandel and the Roxburgh Icones
From the early 20th century Nilgiri hills, Ootacamund Flowers and the Flora of South Indian Hills
Ars Botanica begins with these three gardens and texts in Indian collections and within these, a focus on unpublished drawings, anonymous and invisible artists, unknown indigenous collaborators.[1] It is my hope that the archive will add – region by region, garden by garden, text by text – to diverse ways of seeing Indian botanical art history, as well as ways in which to document these botanical histories within the Kampani kalam. By making the invisible visible, by inserting the names of indigenous artists and highlighting their contributions, the intent is to begin the process of decolonizing the art archive.
It is also my hope that this virtual garden of resources will grow, multiply, and blossom in fields far from home. Colonial botanical art, after all, was valuable (to the empire, if not always the colony) because tropical plant specimens or their herbaria - i.e. dried or desiccated plant specimens - did not always survive overseas passage back to imperial garden collections. The art, created by native artists, thus allowed colonial botanists and administrators in Leiden or Kew or Edinburgh to 'see' species they had never encountered in their natural habitat. And in many cases, never would. Given that the word diaspora itself rests on a botanical etymology (dia/across +spora/scatter), a better label than Kampani style might be Indian diasporic or export art from periphery to center, from regional Indian garden to Company archive. In these diasporic journeys, Kampani botanical style traces a parallel story of how it was Eastern art, or the documentation of that art, that drove Western science. And in so doing, helped create the colonial archive even if its creators, its artists, were unknown, unnamed and unsung. This site is my fledgeling attempt to begin to refigure that archive -- reinserting artist names one by one, plant by plant, warp by weft to map the art of Indian botanical gardens.
