Meet our Fellows: Q&A with Flower Book Researcher Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen
OSGF
We’ve all admired the illustrations in historical botanical books, some of them maintaining their vibrancy even after hundreds of years stored in library collections or archives. But have you ever wondered about the materials that artists of the past used to paint a bright red poppy, or a blazing orange Turk’s-cap lily?
Remaking the colors used for historical flower illustrations is one component of historian Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen’s research. Jessie is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and one of our two 2020 Stacy Lloyd III Fellows. She is using the fellowship to support research for her dissertation, “Everlasting Flowers Between the Pages,” a project which investigates the artistic and knowledge production of early modern botanical watercolors and their contribution to the development of plant science. Applying the concept of “making and knowing” and “learning by doing,” Jessie particularly engages with historical reworking/remaking as an empirical way to inquire into producing (color) images of the plant world.
We recently caught up with Jessie, whose visit to the Oak Spring Garden Library has been postponed until 2021 due to the pandemic, and asked her to tell us about her fascinating research. Scroll down to read our Q&A with Jessie, and visit her website to learn more about her project, which includes a blog series on her color-making experiments.
Can you tell me about your research, and what you are working on currently?
Azurite, ground but unwashed to separate the pigment from dirt. Photo courtesy of Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen.
My dissertation subject is a seventeenth-century book category that most would regard as the florilegium, or sometimes loosely called the flower book. They are collections of botanical illustrations, mostly images of garden flowers. Depending on who you ask, they are often argued to be simply the coffee table book of the past with little to no scientific value.
My approach to these images is to look at them from a more holistic perspective. I ask how they played into different types of engagement with plants in the past – such as their relation to gardening and other botanical publications of the time. In other words, how they participated in the knowledge production of plants, from the perspective of decorative plants rather than, for example, medicinal plants. There are clear, scientific reasons behind studying medicinal and utilitarian plants, but with garden flowers, those reasons might not be as explicit.
My contribution to this discussion is bringing different branches of knowledge together to examine these beautiful botanical watercolors from the seventeenth century. I engage in conceptual debates in the history of art and science, of course, but also delve into hands-on practice. This is why I have been recreating many pigments because historical pigments are what gave the illustrations their colors. Mediums have their own language. A print, such as a woodcut or engraving, communicates visual information differently from a watercolor, which communicates visual information differently from an oil painting. Looking into the technical production is a way to understand the material aspect of visual communication, and how “watercolor technology" made the visualization of plants – especially the colors of the plants – possible in the seventeenth century. Those are the two major components of my research.
How did you first become interested in researching these seventeenth-century flower books?
The interest came from my own artistic practice. I am not a professional botanical illustrator, but I produced a set of botanical watercolors for the final portfolio of my bachelor’s degree in Illustration. Seventeenth-century flower books were one of my inspirations when I was doing visual research for my own project (although I did not know that is what they are at that time). I then became more interested in the history of botanical illustration, and I turned to art history as my study of choice in grad school. However, it was not until I started reading literature from the history of science that I realized that many historians in this field have studied similar botanical images. It became clear to me that an interdisciplinary approach discussing both the artistic and scientific sides of flower books would provide a more nuanced understanding of these images.
Flower books present a suitable playground to examine issues in early modern art and science because they walk a fine line between the two. They are not regarded entirely as fine art pieces, unlike flower still-lives in oil. They are not considered as scientific according to the modern definition of science. They have often been objects of admiration, but have not received as much academic or scientific interest. However, as we know that early modern art and science did not have such a clear division between the two, I want to rethink the role of flower books within the framework of knowledge production, which is a burgeoning discourse in early modern scholarship.
A red wash made using Brazilwood shavings. Photo courtesy of Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen.
What have you learned from recreating pigments?
I am not a conservator and do not have access to technical equipment, such as the XRF machine, so I am not trying to identify the specific pigments used in the flower books of my study. Rather, making pigments is a way to comprehend the color world of the early modern period through sensorial engagements and understand how these different materials could affect the visualization of colorful flowers and plants.
To research the materiality of historical colors, I reconstruct pigments and make paints by following instructions in contemporaneous treatises and recipes on colors and art materials. On one hand, this practice helps unpack historical recipes. On the other, it gives information on the material properties of different colors. For example, today, ultramarine is mostly a synthetic color that can be easily obtained either as manufactured pigment or ready-to-use oil or watercolor paint. While the color can be close to the authentic one made of lapis lazuli, how the synthetic pigment needs to be prepared for paint making and how the paint behaves differ greatly from the mineral pigment.
My artistic background gave me a decent understanding of modern watercolor, but I had to unlearn many things when working with historical colors. The concept of what watercolor is remains more-or-less the same, but how I interact with modern and historical watercolors differs. Additionally, the hands-on research helps me understand the practical challenges of working with these materials, and perhaps these could be the reasons why some plants were visualized in a certain way. Sometimes the reasons are ideological artistic decisions, but sometimes they can simply be practical responses to the availability of art materials.
Jessie at work in the university lab. Photo courtesy of Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen.
What is one of the most interesting things you have come across over the course of your research?
Every year I find something different to be fascinated about. For this year, I think one of the most interesting things is the diversity of materials that artists used to work with in order to make color images.
What we often think of as color terms, including ultramarine and gamboge, used to be material terms at the same time. Some of the material sources are minerals, some of them are metals, and some of them are plants. (Some historical colors are highly toxic, so at times safer substitutes are used instead). Lake pigment is the subject of my latest experiments for my hands-on research. It is made by extracting the dye of a natural material, mostly plants but sometimes insects or sea snails, and then precipitating the dye onto a substrate.
Lake pigments are fascinating in this regard: many of them were once plants themselves which we then transform and use to visualize other plants. It shows the fluid relationships we have with plants. They can be utilitarian, scientific, beautiful and inspiring altogether, and making lake pigment is an all-encompassing experience of this spectrum.
What do you hope people learn, or take away, from your research?
Within academic debates, I hope to bring different discussions together to reconsider flower books and their position in the development of plant or botanical knowledge in the early modern period. In terms of medium or material, I hope that this project can help people look at watercolors in a different light. Generally speaking, watercolor is often regarded as a medium for preliminary studies for oil paintings. While this is true in many cases, it does not address the larger application of the medium in the early modern period. Watercolors in early modern flower books are slightly different from what people usually think of when hearing the word watercolor. Their materials and techniques are somewhere in between medieval illuminations and watercolors from late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which are closer to our understanding of watercolor today. Through writing about the materiality of flower books, I want to bring more attention to the watercolor technology of the early modern period.
What attracted you to the Stacy Lloyd Fellowship, and the Oak Spring Garden Library?
The collection is remarkable. There are three seventeenth-century flower books in particular that are useful examples for my project. It is not common to have so many volumes in one collection because many lesser-known flower books are disassembled and the sheets are now scattered throughout the world. Having three flower books that are still intact in codex form and under the same roof with many contemporaneous botanical publications of different kinds makes the Oak Spring Garden Library one of the must-visit places for my research. I had also known about the Oak Spring from previous short visits for other occasions, and had always wanted to return for a more extended period to study items from the collection more closely.
Some of the illustrations from Hortus floridus Iessi, a collection of flower watercolors inspired by seventeenth-century European flower books. Jessie, who has a background in illustration, began the project as a way to relax in her free time. You can learn more about her creative works on her website. Images courtesy of Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen.
Just for fun - what do you like to do in your free time?
I recently started making my own flower book. I reconnected with my artistic practice during the Covid-19 lockdown, and now I am making a series of little watercolors that are inspired by the flower books of my study when I have some free time. But I am not painting them with historical colors! That is how I distinguish my research from relaxation: by painting with modern paints instead of historically-made ones. The small watercolors are not what one would call botanical watercolors today, but they are botanical watercolors in a seventeenth-century manner.
When I do not want to be confined in my apartment anymore, I like biking around the city and into the countryside, and the Netherlands is rather a perfect place for it.
Is there anything else you’d like to say?
I am grateful for this grant – particularly that it has helped me establish my own art lab to continue my hands-on research at home during these trying times. Working with many of the pricier materials is also possible because of this grant, which has allowed more room to experiment with more recipes.
Jessie’s project on seventeenth-century flower books is just one example of the range of research the Stacy Lloyd III Fellowship for Bibliographic Study supports (you can read about our other 2020 Stacy Lloyd Fellow, Josepha Richard, who is researching eighteenth-century botanist John Bradby Blake, here). If you are an early career scholar in the humanities whose work is related to plants, gardens, or landscapes, consider applying – the deadline for the 2021 fellowship is August 12.
We are also still accepting applications for a number of other opportunities in 2021, aimed at artists, scientists, conservationists, writers, and more. More information can be found at osgf.org/residencies and osgf.org/fellowships.
Cover image: color mixing sheets, courtesy of Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen.