6. [Bauer (Ferdinand) and William Westall] "Original watercolour drawings for the vignette views of Mount Athos & Physcus (title pages of vol. 8 & 9, Sibthorp, Flora Graeca)" "each approximately 135 x 190mm., old gilt mounts, pencil captions on versos, [c.1800 ]." (2)
est. £1000 – £1500
"Sibthorp himself died before any of his Flora Graeca was published, and the task of seeing it through the press fell on his executors, John Hawkins and Thomas Platt. The former died in 1841 and Platt inherited many drawings and working papers. These were purchased in 1923 from Wheldon & Wesley by G.C. Druce (see Bodleian Library Record, II, 75-76; W.T. Stearn, Sibthorp, Smith, the ‘Flora Graeca’, Taxon, 1967) who bequeathed them to the Botany School at Oxford, and they form part of the basis of the recent book by Lank The Flora Graeca Story, 1999. However in 1930 Druce gave these two drawings to Major General Thomas Bell Lindsay Churchill, CB, CBE, MC (1907-90), and he sold them at Sotheby’s on 22nd March 1977, lot 247, when they were purchased by Wheldon & Wesley for Mike Walpole. When I took these in at the book counter at Sotheby’s (it was over thirty years ago) I did ask the General when he had been given them, but was too overawed to ask any further. His parents were in Ceylon and then Hong Kong, and he was sent to the Magdalen College School in Oxford, just round the corner from the Botanic Garden; he and Druce presumably met then. In 1930 he was a recently commissioned captain in the Manchester Regiment, shortly to depart for Burma, his distinguished career as a Commando in the Eastern Mediterranean lay in the future. The Botany School have only the first 7 vignettes (Lank p.211 says the last 3 “no longer exist”!), and they are in similar style to those present here. Apart from the vignette to vol.10 (still unaccounted for) the present lot is likely to be the only opportunity to buy originals for one of the great botanical masterpieces.
Lank misunderstands Druce’s part in the transmission of the Platt papers stating(for instance) that some views of the Mediterranean “were not prepared for Sibthorp as they were acquired in the 1930s after the death of GC Druce and not after the death of Sibthorp “ (p. 108). Bauer visited Mount Athos in 1787 and a drawing survives; the executors used Westall to work up his sketches into watercolours for the titlepages of the Flora. see Lank, pp. 210-11 “Westall; designing the last frontispieces” Lank’s suggestion that a third artist - Imrie - was involved seems very unlikely as the published version of Mount Athos is signed in the plate by Westall."