Floral Drawings At Waddesdon Manor - Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild's home near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, England, was filled with artworks with flowers

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2000 by Rachel Akpabio

Arbors and garlands, trellises and trophies, asters and acanthus leaves, bee skeps and billing doves[sim] these are just some of the enchanting floral and garden motifs found amongst the eighteenth-century designs in the collection of drawings assembled by Baron Edmond de Rothschild (Fig. 2) and now at Waddesdon Manor, near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, England (P1. I). The manor was built between 1877 and 1889 for Baron Edmond's cousin Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild (1839--1898) to house his magnificent collection of eighteenth-century fine and decorative arts. [1] In 1922 it passed to Baron Edmond's son, James A. de Rothschild (1878--1957), who brought with him the works of art he had inherited from his father. By happy coincidence, Baron Ferdinand and Baron Edmond both preferred art collecting to the family banking business and both had a predilection for the art of the eighteenth century, so that the artworks James brought with him, among them nearly two thousand drawings, primarily French, and almost all from the eighteenth century, were harmoniously integrated into the Buckinghamshire chateau. [2]

The grandson of Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), who founded the great banking dynasty, Baron Edmond lived on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honors in Paris. Like many Rothschilds past and present he was a keen gardener, and his gardens and greenhouses kept the rooms of his house filled with flowers throughout the year. He is said to have been particularly fond of blue and pink hydrangeas, which in the summer months filled the vast fireplaces of his Paris house. He kept his drawings in a series of portfolios in the salon (Fig. 1), and in keeping with this tradition they are today housed in a series of rooms devised by the present Lord Rothschild to suggest a nineteenth-century cabinet de dessins. From the windows there are spectacular views of the parterre and the Aylesbury Vale, which have inspired an exhibition of a number of the drawings with floral motifs, along with several related objects.

Flowers were everywhere in eighteenth-century France: painted on furniture, carved into paneling, modeled in silver, and embroidered on silk. Their popularity reflected a continuing fascination with the natural world, a theme that had its roots in the pastoral tradition of the philosopher and writer Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and in the seventeenth-century sentimental novel [3] Antoine Joseph Dezallier d'Argenville (1680-1765), writing in La theorie et la pratique du jardinage (Paris, 1709), [4] commented on the agreeable effects of beautiful gardens and on the noble simplicity of natural vistas and grassy banks. It was these sentiments, coupled with a vast influx of new plant species from the East that rapidly found expression in the artistic and ornamental decoration of the French eighteenth-century interior.

France had maintained a longstanding tradition of floral decoration in art and manuscript illumination since the Middle Ages. From about 1700, however, a new mood of intimacy and elegance entered the decorative repertoire, together with the colors and movement of elements from the natural world, such as

flowers, shells, and water. The rococo style, exemplified by the piece of dress silk of about 1779 shown in Plate VI, was characterized by a lighter and more relaxed feel for ornament and by a move toward fantasy and exoticism in design. Flowers quickly became a popular motif in the asymmetrical cartouches that were a predominant part of the vocabulary of the rococo, giving a feeling of space and delicacy to this graceful style. Although nature formed the starting point, flowers were seldom drawn with any real kind of botanical correctness. The fantastical and highly stylized design for an embroidered hanging shown in Plate V uses a peony blossom and poppy seeds to evoke an element of chinoiserie similar to t hat seen in the design for a handscreen shown in Plate VII.

This is hardly to say that science was ignored. From the sixteenth century onward a succession of exotic plants had begun to be exported from the East to Europe, among them tulips, santhemums. More than six hundred new titles on horticulture were published in England during the eighteenth century as compared with one hundred in the seventeenth century and a mere nineteen during the sixteenth. [5] In France the Ecole royale gratuite de dessin was founded in Paris in 1766 by the artist and designer Jean Jacques Bachelier (1724-1806). In addition to flower painting, in its early years the ecole taught elements of geometry and architecture also figure, animal, and ornament drawing to more than fifteen hundred pupils. The Sevres biscuit figures in Plate VIII, which bear the incised mark of Bachelier, show how such studies were ultimately translated into objects. Flowers began to be grown exclusively for aesthetic reasons, rather than for their herbal or medicinal properties, and, as might be expected, they rapidl y became a predominant feature of interior decoration.