* Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues Dieppe circa 1533 - 1588 London

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Description

Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues
a sheet of flowers: two opium poppies, a lily and a love-in-a-mist, with a beetle and a tortoiseshell butterfly
bears later Latin inscriptions in pen and ink, in two different hands, below the plants (partly illegible): p..., m.... and nigella romana
watercolor and gouache, heightened with white (partly oxidized), over black chalk

Catalogue Note

We are grateful to Dr. Sam Segal for the following comments on the variety of opium poppies, papaver somniferum, depicted in this sheet. The two flowers are both early forms of this flower. The purplish one is very near to the botanical and agricultural species, which is lilac purple with five petals, not usually ragged-edged. The other is a prototype of the other, lanciniate (ragged-edged) red form of the flower, but still has a fairly archaic single bloom, which is a prototype of the horticultural double forms. The agricultural types were already categorised in the Grete Herball published in England in 1526, and separated on the basis of the colour of their seeds into the 'blacke poppy' and the 'white poppy,' the former grown for its seeds and oil, the latter for opium.