Le Moyne de Morgues, Jacques

Clove Pinks



Very fine watercolor and gouache drawing of a wildflower, on paper prepared as vellum (7 5/8 x 5 3/4 in.; 192 x 146 mm), originally folio 31 in a manuscript florilegium by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, (France ca. 1570). Floated and glazed in a handsome gilt frame.

Sotheby's New York, Old Master Drawings, 26 January 2005, lot 46

This watercolor and those in the following twelve lots derive from one of just five substantial groups of works by Le Moyne that have been identified to date. Manuscript florilegia by Le Moyne are also housed in the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Oak Spring Garden Library (Upperville, Virginia); in addition, a group of twenty-seven rather less formally conceived watercolors was discovered in 2003 and sold at Sotheby's New York, 21 January 2004.

These elegant compositions are conceived almost as miniatures, carefully constructed, presented within illusionistic frames, and executed on specially prepared paper. Peter Bower has made an extensive study of the papers used in the various groups of drawings by Le Moyne, and has established that the paper used here, which contains a distinctive pot watermark with the letters ISIMO/NNET (very similar to Briquet 12826), was almost certainly made on the same moulds as the paper on which the Le Moyne drawings in the Victoria & Albert Museum are executed. He attributes this paper to a French manufacturer named Simonnet, and dates it to the early 1560s. The watermarks are to be found at the edges of the sheets, running through the spine and onto the next sheet, which is what one would expect when the larger sheets of paper that were produced on these moulds were folded in four, ready for binding and cutting. Moreover, one side of each sheet has been stone glazed prior to the execution of the paintings (as seems also to be the case in the Oak Spring florilegium). This process involved working over the surface of the paper with a heavy stone, to achieve a smooth, polished surface similar in texture to vellum. Sometimes, as here, an even greater smoothness was achieved by working casein into the paper during this process. The extremely smooth, vellum-like surface that resulted would have been much more suited to the artist's fine, miniaturist technique than ordinary untreated paper.

Le Moyne was the earliest professional artist to travel in North America. He was born in around 1533, in Dieppe, which was at the time a great center of cartography and illumination. Nothing is known of his training and earlier career, until early 1564, when he seems to have been instructed by the French King Charles IX to travel as cartographer and official recording artist on an astonishing and ill-fated expedition to establish a Huguenot settlement in Florida, led by the notable mariners Jean Ribault and René Goulaine de Laudonnière. After his return to France in early 1566, Le Moyne wrote a fascinating illustrated description of the voyage and account of the various disasters that befell the party, most of whom perished, some at the hands of the local Indian tribes or the Spanish, and others as a result of mutiny and rebellion within their own ranks. Only fifteen returned alive. This account was published in Frankfurt by Theodor de Bry in 1591, under the title Brevis narratio eorum quae in Florida Americae provincia Gallis acciderunt; it contains 42 engraved maps and illustrations of the inhabitants of Florida and their customs, and is an extremely important early source of information on these subjects. In 1572, Le Moyne fled to England to avoid the Huguenot massacres, and remained there until his death in 1588. Soon after his arrival in England, he came to the attention of Sir Walter Raleigh, to whom he was probably introduced by his fellow artist John White, who shared similar interests in exploration, and Raleigh remained one of the artist's most important patrons for the rest of his career.

Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues is a central figure in the history of the making of florilegia. The pioneering works of European botany were conceived as scientific texts, illustrated with woodcuts that were more informative than beautiful. Slightly later in the sixteenth century, a parallel tradition in botanical illustration began to emerge, in which the emphasis was at least as much on the aesthetic qualities of the illustrations, and the plants were reproduced in ever more refined engravings or etchings or, in a few cases, original watercolors or gouaches. These florilegia were made for amateur botanists and aristocrats who wished to own not only a record of the rare plants that they were cultivating in their gardens—horticulture was increasingly fashionable during this period—but also a beautiful artistic object. In fact, the late sixteenth-century fashion for gardening was closely linked with other aspects of taste, and the work of botanical artists such as Le Moyne de Morgues reflected very closely, and also influenced, contemporary styles in costume and other textiles, and in decoration and ornament in general. Not only after his move to England in around 1572 but already in his early years in France, Le Moyne was one of the greatest and most original botanical artists of his time, and there are virtually no surviving florilegia that antedate Le Moyne's known works of this type from his French period.

This subject is represented in all four of the other Le Moyne botanical groups.