Fine-art print →
Russian botanical art has a founding book, and almost nobody has seen it. I found my way to it through juniper, of all things. It is a plant with one of the widest ranges of any conifer, though. It grows across the whole territory Catherine the Great sent naturalists to survey. Her flora of the Russian Empire was meant to run to six hundred plates. It stopped at 101.
TL;DRCatherine II funded the Academic Expeditions of 1768 to 1774. She also underwrote Flora Rossica, the first great illustrated flora of Russia. A change of ministers cut the funding, so 101 of a planned 500 to 600 plates were published.
Key Facts
What Russian botanical art was actually paid for
Catherine was building a reputation as much as a science. She wanted Russia inside the cultural life of Europe. An enlightened ruler in the 1760s was expected to fund natural history. So the botany served a political purpose, although saying so does not diminish it.
In 1767 she invited the German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas to the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Bryn Mawr’s special collections describe the commission plainly. Pallas was to catalogue the plants and animals of Russia, and Catherine would pay for the travelling. He stayed for the rest of his life, as it turned out.
The expeditions that came first
Before the book there was the survey. The Academic Expeditions ran from 1768 to 1774, sending teams across Siberia and the far edges of the empire. Before that, almost no naturalist had described the country. Pallas led one of them.
They came back in 1774 with plants, animals, minerals, and a mass of geographic and ethnographic record. His letters home became a three-volume travel account published between 1771 and 1776. He also taught natural history to the young grand dukes, including the future Alexander I. That detail shows how close to the throne this work sat.
The scale is what makes it unusual. Joséphine bought a garden and the plates that recorded it, and the Medici bought institutions. Catherine bought territory. A state-run biological survey of roughly a sixth of the world’s land surface, over six years.
Flora Rossica: 101 plates of a planned six hundred
Flora Rossica appeared in St Petersburg from the imperial press of J. J. Weitbrecht, in two parts dated 1784 and 1788. The full title records the arrangement: published by order and under the auspices of Catherine II.
It carries 101 hand-coloured engraved plates, made after drawings by Karl Friedrich Knappe of the Russian Academy of Art. Around 283 species are described, while hundreds more waited. The plants are named in Latin and in Russian, which was not standard practice. Clearly the book was meant to be used inside Russia rather than only admired abroad. Its frontispiece is pure court allegory. Catherine sits among clouds and cherubs, one of them presenting her with the volume.
Then it stopped, though not for want of material. The work was intended to reach five or six hundred plates. Ministers changed, the money did not arrive, and the second volume was abandoned. JSTOR’s Global Plants entry on Pallas calls it the first real flora of Russia while noting it was never completed.
Why Russian botanical art got forgotten
Canons are built from finished things, however unfair that is. An incomplete book is hard to teach, hard to reprint and hard to place in a survey. So it drifts out of the story, even when its plates are as good as anyone’s.
What happened to the abandoned second volume is itself unclear. Some accounts have a second volume appearing in 1815, after Pallas died. Others say that in 1831 a mere 25 plates were pulled toward a second volume that was never printed. Both cannot be right. The disagreement is a symptom of the same problem: nobody has had a reason to settle it.
Russian botanical art is a gap in the history of botanical illustration rather than a chapter in it. The French and British traditions crowded it out, since both finished what they started. It is worth reopening. A state that funds a six-year survey and prints 101 plates has done something no private patron could.
Drawing juniper, and the point of a state flora
Juniper is not a glamorous subject. The berries are small and dull, and the foliage is prickly and repetitive. There is no single flower to organise the page around. I drew it anyway, because it teaches restraint better than any showier plant does.
That is close to the point of a book like Flora Rossica. A state flora is not a selection of beauties. It has to record the ordinary plants that actually cover the ground. So juniper belongs in one, and a rare orchid is almost a distraction. Fiurdelin is a botanical illustration studio on Lake Como, Italy. The catalogue holds 53 published plates, and nine were selected by juried exhibitions in 2026.
Styling imperial botanical art at home
Fine-art print →
The four plates above hang in gold frames along a tall stairwell, and gold is the whole decision here. An imperial register needs one metallic note and nothing else, unless you want pastiche. Gold frames, plain walls, no gilt furniture underneath.
A stairwell suits this arrangement better than a living room does, since you move past it. You climb past the plates rather than sitting opposite them. A vertical run of four then reads as a sequence instead of a grid. Stagger them to the rake of the stairs and keep the spacing even, around 8 to 10 cm between frames. If the wall is straight rather than raked, hang them on one centre line at about 150 cm. Let the width do the work. Three plates need roughly 120 cm of clear wall.
FAQ
Who was Peter Simon Pallas?
A German naturalist, 1741 to 1811, invited to the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1767. He led part of the Academic Expeditions and wrote the first flora of the Russian Empire. He also taught natural history at court, before retiring to Crimea on an estate Catherine gave him.
What is Flora Rossica?
The first great illustrated flora of Russia, published in St Petersburg between 1784 and 1788 under Catherine II’s patronage. It contains 101 hand-coloured engraved plates after Karl Friedrich Knappe and covers around 283 species, named in Latin and Russian.
Why was Flora Rossica never finished?
The money simply stopped. Catherine underwrote the printing, and the plan called for five or six hundred plates. A change of ministers cut off the funds. The second volume was abandoned, and only volume one, in two parts, appeared.
Did Catherine the Great actually care about plants?
She cared about English landscape gardens, and she cared about being seen as an enlightened ruler. Whether she loved botany for itself is not something the record settles. What it does show is sustained spending on other people’s expertise, which is what patronage is.
Where can I see this Russian botanical art?
Complete copies are rare and turn up mainly at auction. The practical route is a research library or a digitised scan. The Bryn Mawr and JSTOR pages linked above are good starting points. Individual plates also circulate through the antiquarian print trade.
What the cluster adds up to
Three patrons, three different purchases. Joséphine paid for plates, and they outlived her garden. The Medici paid for institutions, and those compounded across two centuries. Catherine paid for territory, and the printing stopped halfway. Patronage decides what survives, and it decides just as firmly what does not. Russian botanical art is the clearest case of the third outcome. I followed all three in The Living Canvas. It is on Amazon in print and Kindle, with an audiobook edition on Spotify. The juniper plate that led me here sits in the Fiurdelin collection, and Joséphine’s story is where this cluster started.
