Puzzle in a Paintbox: Cracking Ferdinand Bauer's colour code for the Flora Graeca
The illustrations Ferdinand Bauer (1760-1826) made for one of the most celebrated books of the 18th century, the Flora Graeca, are judged to be among the best natural history paintings ever produced. While travelling in 1786, with John Sibthorp’s party on an expedition to retrace the steps of the classical Greek physician Dioscorides, Bauer marked his study drawings of plants with many numbers. When later established in a studio in Oxford, these codes allowed him to make complete, meticulous, coloured folio paintings, up to six years after he had seen the specimens in their original environment. Bauer's working method and his code have resisted explanation for more than two hundred years. However, Jane Jelley thought that it might take a painter to crack a painter's code, and that her own practical knowledge, and familiarity with traditional methods and materials might lead to an answer.
In her talk to the Society, Jane will look at Bauer's paintings and matching coded field drawings, explain the challenging working circumstances in which these were made, and will explore why Bauer needed to devise a mnemonic code for himself. How could he play back his visual sensations after so much time, and with such precision? After reading many old painting treatises, and trying out many recipes, Jane discovered that the individual characteristics and handling qualities of each of the pigments in Bauer's own ordered paintbox provided the key to finding the meanings of his numbers.
Biography:
Jane Jelley is a painter of still life and landscape, who has become interested in historical painting processes, and the contribution of traditional materials and methods to artistic outcomes. She has been able to make some unexpected conclusions about previously puzzling questions of painting technique, after studying and testing old ways of working in her own studio. As an independent researcher she has written papers for scholarly and technical journals, and she published her answer to Bauer's code for the Flora Graeca in 2023. Her book on Johannes Vermeer and his possible use of the camera obscura, Traces of Vermeer, was produced by Oxford University Press in 2017.