Fine-art print →
Patrons of botanical art are the reason I had a peony to draw. Paeonia lactiflora is native to northern China, Siberia and Mongolia. It is in European gardens because wealthy people paid to have it brought. Sir Joseph Banks got it to Kew. A shipment of Chinese tree peonies reached Malmaison two years earlier. The plant on my desk has a purchase history before it has a botany.
TL;DRBotanical art has no prize and no academy, so its canon records who paid rather than who was best. The Medici bought institutions, Joséphine bought plates, Catherine bought territory. Shirley Sherwood built the first gallery in the world dedicated to the field.
Key Facts
Why patrons of botanical art decided the canon
Botanical illustration has no Nobel and no academy. There is no prize that settles who was best, and there never has been. What the field has instead is a survival record, and survival is expensive.
A drawing survives if someone paid to have it made, engraved and printed. Then somebody owned a house dry enough to store it for two centuries. Every one of those is a funding decision. So the great botanical artists are largely the artists whose patrons completed all four steps.
That is not a cynical reading. It is the reason the history of botanical illustration looks the way it does. Dense clusters of masterpieces around a handful of courts, and gaps everywhere else. The gaps are not periods without talent. They are periods without money.
The Medici bought institutions
Cosimo I offered Luca Ghini a chair at Pisa in 1543. Ghini accepted on one condition: a garden of his own. The result is generally described as the oldest university botanic garden in the world.
What followed compounded for two centuries. Ghini invented the herbarium, and his pupil Cesalpino wrote the first serious plant classification. Under Francesco I the painter Jacopo Ligozzi produced natural history studies, of which 129 survive in the Uffizi. None of that was Medici work. All of it was Medici payroll.
The Medici and Florentine botany is the clearest case in the field of patronage buying infrastructure rather than objects. A garden, a filing method, a classification system and a body of images. The family made none of them, and all of them outlived it.
The English pattern: collectors, duchesses and Banks
Britain produced patrons of botanical art on a different model, through private collections rather than state institutions. The Duchess of Beaufort and the Duchess of Portland both assembled substantial plant collections. Both employed painters to record them. The aristocratic collecting habit they represent ran for most of the eighteenth century.
Sir Joseph Banks turned that habit into a system. He sailed with Cook, then effectively directed Kew, and he organised the voyages that brought plants and painters together. Ferdinand Bauer went to Australia on the Investigator because Banks arranged it. The Bauer plates are among the most accurate ever made.
Banks is also where the peony enters. An academic account of the Chinese peony’s westward journey records P. lactiflora reaching Kew via Banks by 1805, joining the tree peony already there. Almost every garden peony in Europe and America descends from that species.
Joséphine bought plates
Joséphine acquired Malmaison in 1799 and spent the rest of her life buying plants and pictures. She appointed Pierre-Joseph Redouté as flower painter. She funded 120 plates for Jardin de la Malmaison and eight volumes of Les Liliacées. Another 152 followed with Bonpland.
The garden did not survive her. Malmaison was sold and broken up, the rose collection decayed, and the property passed out of the family. The plates survived completely, which is why anyone knows what grew there.
That inversion is the lesson of Joséphine’s patronage. She is remembered for a rose garden whose documentation is thin. The durable thing she paid for was the printing. Her tree peonies arrived at Malmaison in 1803, two years before Banks got the herbaceous species to Kew. These courts were competing closely.
Catherine the Great bought territory
Catherine funded something neither Florence nor Malmaison attempted. From 1768 to 1774 the Academic Expeditions surveyed the Russian Empire. Teams crossed Siberia and the far edges of the country, and Peter Simon Pallas led one of them.
Then she paid to print it. Flora Rossica appeared in St Petersburg between 1784 and 1788, with 101 hand-coloured plates after Karl Friedrich Knappe. It describes around 283 species, naming them in Latin and Russian.
The plan called for five or six hundred plates. Ministers changed, the money stopped, and the second volume was abandoned. Russian botanical art is largely absent from the English-language canon, and the reason is not quality. An unfinished book is hard to teach and hard to reprint, so it drops out of the story.
What patrons of botanical art actually decided
Three patrons, three different purchases, three different outcomes. The Medici bought institutions and those compounded. Joséphine bought plates and those outlived the garden. Catherine bought territory and the printing stopped halfway.
Put together, they show patronage deciding four separate things. It decided who could work at all, since Ghini needed a chair and Ligozzi needed a salary. It decided what got drawn, because a patron’s interest sets the subject list. Printing was the third, and that is where Catherine’s project failed. Survival was the fourth, because storage is a cost somebody has to keep paying.
Notice what is missing from that list. Artistic merit appears nowhere in it. Merit determined how good the plates were once commissioned, and patronage determined whether they existed.
Where the money came from
A pillar about wealthy patrons should say where the wealth originated, because the answers are uncomfortable and usually omitted.
The Medici were bankers. Banks operated inside an imperial project, and the voyages that carried his painters were instruments of it. Catherine’s survey was an inventory of conquered and colonised territory as much as a work of science. Joséphine bought heavily from a London nursery while France and Britain were at war. The consignments crossed the Channel through a naval blockade her husband’s navy enforced.
There is a subtler cost too. The academic account of the Chinese peony makes a further point. The plants arriving at Kew and Malmaison were stripped of the medical and cultural meanings they carried in China. They became ornamental flora instead. So the patronage that preserved these plants on paper also flattened what they meant. Both things are true, and the field is more interesting when it holds both.
Patrons of botanical art in the present: Shirley Sherwood
The modern chapter is the strongest argument that patronage still decides the canon, because it happened recently enough to watch.
Dr Shirley Sherwood trained as a botanist at Oxford. She bought her first contemporary botanical painting at Kew in July 1990. Kew records the collection at over 1,000 paintings and drawings. They are by more than 300 artists living in 36 countries, assembled across thirty years.
Then she did what patrons do. The Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art opened at Kew in April 2008. It was the first gallery in the world dedicated solely to botanical art. Kew calls it the focus of a worldwide renaissance in the field. Its walls set contemporary work beside older plates from an archive of 200,000 images.
Whether that renaissance would have happened without her is unanswerable. A living discipline with a public gallery is a different discipline from one without. That is the same mechanism as Cosimo’s chair. Four hundred years later, and in a private collection rather than a court.
Why so many patrons were women
Four of the six patrons of botanical art in the table above are women. That is not a curated coincidence. Botanical art sat outside the prestige hierarchy of European painting. That made it available to people the academies excluded or ignored.
Aristocratic women could collect plants and commission plant painters without breaching any convention about what a woman should do. Two empresses could fund botany as statecraft. Natural history was what an enlightened ruler was expected to sponsor. A private collector in the 1990s could build the definitive holding of a field. The museums were not yet taking it seriously.
The consequence runs the other way too. Because women funded so much of it, botanical art became one of the few fields where women could work professionally. That is the subject of the women botanical artists pillar. Patronage and participation are the same story told from two ends.
Patrons of botanical art after the courts
The single patron has mostly gone, and the market replaced them. A botanical illustrator today is funded by many small purchases rather than one salary. The rest comes from scientific commissions, teaching, and juried exhibitions that confer the credential a court appointment used to.
That is a more democratic arrangement and a less durable one. A court painter had one client and a twenty-year horizon. A studio has hundreds of clients and no horizon at all. That is better for independence and worse for anything taking a decade.
The institutions still matter, which is why the herbaria and the archives outlast every private collection. What has changed is that the person deciding what gets drawn is now the person buying the print. That is a real shift in who holds the pencil.
Drawing a peony that arrived by patronage
The peony is a difficult plate for an obvious reason. The flower is a mass of overlapping petals with almost no visible structure. So the drawing has to invent an order the plant does not offer. I spent longer on the sepals than on anything else. They are the only part that explains how the whole thing holds together.
Knowing its arrival record changed what the plate is about for me. A garden peony is not a wild plant that happens to be pretty. It is the end of a supply chain. That ran from Chinese nurseries through East India Company shipping to two competing imperial gardens. Fiurdelin is a botanical illustration studio on Lake Como, Italy. The catalogue holds more than 50 published plates, and nine were selected by juried exhibitions in 2026.
Styling patron-era botanical art at home
Fine-art print →
The four plates above are hydrangea, tulip, peony and damask rose, framed in white on a grey bedroom wall. That grouping is a patron’s garden rather than a colour scheme. All four reached European gardens through the collecting habit this article describes. Hanging them together makes that visible.
Keep the frames uniform and the mats generous. A patron-era grouping reads as a collection. A collection wants consistency in the framing, so the variety sits in the plants. Grey, chalk and pale stone walls all work, since the plates carry the colour. Four 30 by 40 cm frames in a row need about 145 cm of clear wall. As a two-by-two block they occupy 68 by 88 cm. Hang them on one centre line rather than staggered, because the historical arrangement was symmetrical. The botanical art prints pages show the same grouping at real heights in other rooms.
FAQ
Who were the most important patrons of botanical art?
The Medici from the 1540s, Sir Joseph Banks in the late eighteenth century, and Catherine the Great from 1767. Then Empress Joséphine from 1799, and Dr Shirley Sherwood from 1990. Each funded a different thing: institutions, voyages, plates, a survey, and a gallery.
Why did patronage matter so much in botanical art?
Because the field has no prize and no academy to settle reputations. A plate survives only if someone paid to make it, engrave it, print it and store it. So the canon records completed funding rather than assessed merit.
Were most botanical art patrons women?
A striking number were. Botanical art sat outside the prestige hierarchy of European painting. That made it available to collectors the academies overlooked, including aristocratic women, two empresses and a modern private collector.
Who is the most important patron of botanical art today?
Dr Shirley Sherwood, by most accounts. Her collection runs to over 1,000 works by more than 300 artists from 36 countries. The gallery named after her at Kew opened in 2008. It was the first in the world devoted to the field.
Where can I see work these patrons commissioned?
The Uffizi holds the Ligozzi studies in its prints and drawings department. Kew holds an archive of 200,000 botanical images alongside the Sherwood collection. Flora Rossica and Redouté’s volumes appear in research libraries and at auction rather than on permanent display.
What a patron actually leaves behind
Patrons of botanical art never fund it for the reason it ends up mattering. Cosimo wanted a physician’s teaching garden and produced the herbarium. Joséphine wanted a rose collection and left the plates. Catherine wanted an enlightened reputation and left an unfinished masterpiece that nobody teaches. The results outran the intentions every time, which is the most encouraging thing about the whole history. I followed all of it at more length in The Living Canvas. It is on Amazon in print and Kindle, with an audiobook edition on Spotify. The peony that opened this piece sits with the other plates in the Fiurdelin collection. The medieval herbals pillar covers the monastic patronage that came before any of these courts.
