Amazing botanical artist III - Berthe Hoola van Nooten

Here is another amazing female botanical artist in the tradition of Marianne North and Marian Ellis Rowan.

Berthe Hoola van Nooten (1817 - 1892) was the daughter of an Utrecht vicar. There is little on record about her young years, except that she was already fascinated by natural science and particularly skilled at flower painting.

In 1838 she married Dirk Hoola van Nooten. After their marriage, the couple travelled to the Dutch colony of Suriname in South America, where Dirk Hoola van Nooten worked as a judge. Berthe often travelled between Suriname and Batavia (now Jakarta) with her husband, and it was during these travels that her interest in botanical plants and painting grew. The records show that she sent cultivated plants back to botanical gardens in the Netherlands. These specimens were collected on trips through Suriname and Java with her husband.

Only nine years after her marriage and with five young children, van Nooten’s husband suddenly died in 1847, leaving her with large debts and a large young family. Unable to pay for the family’s journey back to the Netherlands, the young widow decided to take advantage of her compulsory banishment. Aware of the great interest in Europe for lavish illustrations of exotic fruit and flowers, she decided to produce watercolour plates depicting interesting plant species from Java. Would she have bothered creating professional works, had she not been so pressed financially? Probably not.

Cynometra Cauliflora or Nam Nam

After returning home to the Netherlands, she tried to get her watercolours publish but failed. It was only through the intervention and eventual patronage of the Netherlandish Queen Sophie Mathilde, who strongly supported the arts, that Berthe was finally able to get a selection of her paintings published in 1864. Queen Sophie, wife of the Dutch King William III, was no intellectual slouch. She corresponded with several European scholars, protected and stimulated the arts and supported her favourite causes, including the construction of public parks. But the records don’t say how Berthe came to the Queen’s attention.

The forty large plates in the book "Fleurs fruits et feuillages choisis de l’ile de Java" were printed in Belgium from Van Nooten's original sketches by the Belgian lithographer Pieter Depannemaeker, using the new technique of chromolithography. The exquisite colour-plates, often finished by hand, depicted a range of Java’s tropical splendour; its indigenous and introduced flowering trees, shrubs, decorative flowers and plants with edible fruits. Each brilliantly coloured plate was accompanied by a description of the plants and their culinary, medical and other uses in French and English.

BibliOdyssey blog has beautiful versions of some of the fruit illustrations. Botany Photo of the Day blog has an exquisite flower I have never seen before: torch ginger which was native to Indonesia, Malaysia and southern Thailand. Visual Creative blog saw the arts works of famous Victorian women and dreamt of becoming a specialist in botanical illustration.

Van Nooten managed to accentuate the splendour of each species by adopting a style that combined great precision and clarity with a touch of neo-Baroque exuberance, revelling in the rich forms and colours of the tropics. Cynometra Cauliflora/Nam Nam for example, is native to South East Asia and is a small tree having a knotted trunk yielding edible light brown or greenish yellow flowered fruit.

Carica papaya

Despite three editions of the work being published during her lifetime, Berthe Hoola van Nooten died in poverty in Batavia in 1892. So how did copies of the original publication get into Australian libraries? Apparently the books were acquired from Daphne van Nooten whose late husband was the artist’s great great nephew. Published some 16 years after the first edition, the 1880 editions held by the 3 Australian libraries (National Library of Australia in Canberra, State Library of Victoria and University of Melbourne’s library) is regarded as an improved edition. In acquiring this publication, the libraries were aware of another C19th female artist whose work complemented those already held in Australia.

The Tropenmuseum is an anthropological museum located in Amsterdam and established in 1864 in order to show the Netherlands’ overseas possessions. The museum, operated by the Royal Tropical Institute, uses visual arts and photographic works for its exhibitions.  Its two beautiful portraits of our artist are in the permanent collection.

Two recent specialist exhibitions should be noted. In Washington DC, Illustrating Nature: Three Centuries of Botanical Prints showcased the tremendous contributions women artists made to the development of botanical art from the C17th onwards. The 2001 exhibition, organised by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, featured 50 prints and four books by British and European artists. The illustrations of artists who completed works while travelling abroad make up a significant part of the exhibition, including Berthe Hoola Van Nooten.

Map Batavia/Jakarta

Studio Botanika NY specialises in botanical and natural history prints from 1700 on. They are having a very special exhibit showing the work of women botanical illustrators, including Berthe Hoola van Nooten. They noted that it was typical for many women artists to sign their work only as: 'by a lady.' Victorian women were modest, reserved and not self-promoting; thus their contributions, however great, were rarely recognised. Those who did illustrate professionally were typically underpaid. However the time was right because, during the Victorian era, exploration became so common because the elite of society craved the most unusual plants. Plant breeding exploded, and vast conservatories were constructed to hold the plant oddities.

The Bluest Blue has a gorgeous botanical print by Augusta Innes Baker Withers (1792–1869). Now I must look for any published material about Ms Withers.

Nevinson WW1 art, Fine Arts Society UK

In 1917, The Fine Arts Society in London exhibited a series of works called The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals. Commissioned by the Bureau of Information, the exhibition used 9 headings: Making Soldiers, Making Sailors, Making Guns, Building Ships, Building Aircraft, Transport by Sea, Women’s Work, Work on the Land and Tending the Wounded. 12 artists made prints for the ‘Ideals’ and nine artists depicted the ‘Efforts’.

Nevinson, 

Paths of Glory, 1917

Christopher Nevinson (1889–1946), one of the important artists in the exhibition, studied alongside Paul Nash, Ben Nicolson and Stanley Spencer and became Britain’s foremost Futurist. But it is his pictures of the Great War, based on his experiences on the Western Front as an ambulance driver in the Army Medical Corps that Mike McKiernan focused on. Nevinson was the first artist to depict realistically what was happening at the Western Front and although not a confirmed pacifist, his antiwar sentiments led him to emphasise the appalling human cost of war. Paths of Glory, now in the Imperial War Museum, was censored during WW1.

The 1917 show didn't show George Lambert,  Charles Jagger or Will Longstaff, so I have included them in previous posts.

In 2009 The Fine Arts Society in London again held an exhibition called War. They wrote that wars were the catalyst for the best artists of their generation to produce their most modern, powerful and beautiful work, even more importantly because photographic images of the reality of war had been repressed. The show included two of the most stark and memorable works on paper of WW1, Returning to the Trenches by CRW Nevinson and The Void of War by Paul Nash. There is also a group of three horror-filled paintings by Nash done in the trenches in 1917, in which he vividly recorded a landscape transformed by high explosive.

Nevinson, 

French Troops Resting, 1916

Many of the artists (Charles Sargeant Jagger, Paul Nash, CRW Nevinson, William Roberts, Edward Wadsworth) were on the battle fields themselves during WW1. This first-hand experience gave their work immediacy and brutal honesty. It took a message from the trenches to the firesides back at home. Nevinson's 1916 drypoints were his first prints of war subjects. He served with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver, stretcher-bearer and interpreter, and was faced with the wounded, many of whom died through lack of medical attention, in scenes of unspeakable horror.

Jagger’s The Driver, part of the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner, is one of his greatest and most moving sculptures. Consider it alongside Wipers, a bronze of a rifleman standing with bayonet fixed. The large watercolour Gunners Pulling Cannons at Ypres by William Roberts and Edward Wadsworth’s woodcut Drydocked for Scaling and Painting were equally powerful.

The Fine Art Society put up some of the paintings on their web page. So did Weimar with an excellent range of Allied and German WW1 paintings. And you can enjoy Travels With My Art's post about Nevinson called I Love an Arty Mystery.

Spanish missions in California: architecture and industry

I asked my history students about Spanish (1697–1821) and Mexican (1821-34) mission architecture in California and no-one knew anything about it. Nor did they know about the Mexican ranchos (1834-49).

The Kingdom of Spain always sought to establish missions to convert to Roman Catholicism the pagans in New Spain i.e Caribbean, Mexico and most of what today is the SW USA. This was to save their souls, of course, but also to facilitate colonisation of these lands awarded to Spain by the Catholic Church. The Spanish Crown laid claim to Alta California in 1542, but the first permanent Jesuit mission, Misión de Nuestra Señora de Loreto Conchó, wasn’t established till 1697. Jesuit control over the peninsula was only very slowly extended.

The missions arose from the need to control Spain's ever-expanding holdings. The government and Church realised the colonies would require a literate population base that Spain could not supply. The c300,000 indigenous Americans had to learn Spanish, vocations and Christianity.

San Diego de Alcalá Mission, founded in 1769

Alta California was to be settled by Franciscan monks, protected by troops in the California Missions. The Franciscans hoped to convert the tribes to Christianity and to train them for life in colonial society. Converts were required to live in the walled mission enclosure or on rancherías, separate settlements sponsored by missions.

Loreto Mission had been running since 1697. But it wasn’t until the threat of incursion by Russian fur traders and potentially settlers, coming down from Alaska episodically in the 1760s, that Spain felt development and control of the northern colonies was necessary.

Father-Presidente was the head of the Catholic missions in Alta and Baja California, appointed by the College of San Fernando de Mexico. After King Carlos III ordered the Jesuits expelled from New Spain in 1768, the Franciscan Junípero Serra became Father Presidente. Serra founded the San Diego de Alcalá Mission in 1769. Later that year, Serra and his men moved up north. They reached Monterey in 1770, where Serra founded the next mission, San Carlos Borromeo Mission.

The road then was merely a horse and mule trail. To facilitate travel, new mission settlements were established about 50ks apart; they were separated by one day's long ride on horseback or 3 days on foot all the way along the 966ks el Camino Real. Heavy freight movement along the California Mission Trail was practical only via water. By 1821, there were 21 Franciscan Alta California missions.

Camino Real, 966ks long, completed by 1821

In 1798 the Spanish started to fill in the spaces along El Camino Real with 5 additional outposts. Sub-missions were small-scale missions that regularly conducted Mass but lacked a resident priest. Sub-missions were established in areas with high numbers of potential native converts and where travellers could take lodging.

Most missions were small, staffed by 2 Franciscans and 6-8 soldiers under an officer, who generally acted as steward of the mission's temporal affairs. Once empowered to erect a mission, the officers chose a site that had a good water and wood supplies, and good fields for herds and crops. The church, kitchen, living quarters, workshops and storerooms were grouped around a quadrangle. A baptised Indian was no longer free to move about the country, but had to labour and worship at the mission under their strict supervision.

The goal of the missions was, above all, to become self-sufficient in relatively short order. So crop farming was the most important industry of any mission. Grapes were also grown & fermented into wine for sacramental use and for trade. Mission Grape was first planted at Mission San Juan Capistrano in 1779; in 1783, the first wine produced in Alta California emerged from the mission's winery. Mission San Gabriel Arcángel introduced the California citrus industry with the planting of the region’s first significant orchard in 1804. Olives (first cultivated at Mission San Diego de Alcalá) were grown, both for use at the mission and to trade for other goods. As Gardens of a Golden Afternoon blog has shown,  gardens were a central part of mission productivity (and beauty).

Mission San Juan Capistrano, founded 1776

Carpenters made wooden structures and furniture. Bricks were fired in kilns, as were ceramic pots. We can call the mission system a giant training school that comprised agriculture, mechanical arts and the raising of live-stock.

Because I am more interested in the architecture, I relied on Native American Netroots to talk about conditions in the missions. "The Franciscan missions were basically slave plantations which required the Indian people to work for the Spanish under cruel conditions. Indians did not come freely to the missions and once there, they were held against their will. Many attempted to escape, and the soldiers stationed at the mission would attempt to recapture them. Escape attempts are severely punished by the Franciscans. Backed by a small number of soldiers stationed at the missions, the priests imposed a rigid system of coerced and disciplined labour, enforced by the use of corporal punishment and other forms of control".

California during the Mission Period was divided into four military districts. Each mission had its own soldiers, nonetheless the independent presidios/barracks , strategically placed along the coast, were built to protect the missions and other Spanish settlements in Upper California. Built from 1769-82, each of these garrisons functioned as a base of military operations for its region eg El Presidio Real de San Carlos de Monterey defended San Luis Obispo Mission. These presidios had guard houses, store rooms, living quarters and an observation tower, and became part of Spanish strategy to halt Russian incursions south. Later the Sonoma Presidio became the new Californian headquarters of the Mexican Army.

Each frontier station was forced to be self-supporting, so the missions were given the responsibility of providing the presidios with the necessary food and manufactured goods to sustain operations. At this stage Spanish influence was marked by the chain of missions reaching from Loreto, north to San Diego to just north of today's San Francisco Bay area, and extended inland c30-70ks from the missions. Mission Nuestra Señora de la Soledad 1791 was located farthest inland, but even this was only 48 ks from the coast.

By 1819, during the exhausting The Mexican War of Independence, Spain decided to limit its reach to Northern California due to the costs involved in sustaining these remote outposts. Only two missions were created north of San Francisco, San Rafael and the Mission San Francisco Solano, founded in Sonoma in 1823. Solano was the last mission opened in the chain; an attempt to found a 22nd mission in Santa Rosa in 1827 failed.

Since the beginning, mission development had been financed out of The Pious Fund of the Californias and consisted of voluntary donations made in Mexico to members of the Society of Jesus. With the onset of the Mexican War of Independence in 1810, this support largely disappeared, and the missions and their converts were left on their own.

Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, founded 1771

The first native Mexican to be elected Governor of Alta California issued a Proclamation of Emancipation in Jul 1826. All Indians within the military districts of San Diego, Santa Barbara and Monterey were freed from missionary rule. Under the General Law of Secularisation of 1827, all persons born in Spain were declared illegal immigrants and were expelled, including many of the Californian clergy. The Mexican Congress passed An Act for the Secularisation of the Missions of California in 1833. It provided for rancher colonisation of both Alta and Baja California, the expenses to come from the the sale of the mission property. In 1834, under the Decree of Confiscation, 9 other settlements soon closed, with 6 more in 1835; San Buenaventura and San Francisco de Asís were among the last to close, in 1836. Today all that remains of the original Mission San Buenaventura is the church and garden. Services are still held in the parish church, where the altar is intact. A small, on-site museum has displays of mission-era artefacts.
*

St Luis Rey, founded 1798.

After secularisation, the Father Presidente transferred the missions' headquarters to Mission Santa Barbara, making it the repository of documents from all the scattered missions.

During the Mexican Rancho Period (1834–49), settlements with large land grants were turned into ranchos, where cattle and sheep were raised. The owners of these ranchos styled themselves after the landed gentry in Spain, and they dominated the ranching industry. At the peak of the missions’ functioning in 1832, the missions controlled perhaps a sixth of Alta California, but the missions faded in importance under Mexican control, while ranching and trade grew.

Although the territory of California was annexed in 1848 by the USA, after the Mexican-American War, a number of mission structures survived or were rebuilt, as noted by the California Beaches Blog and My Two Cents blog. The California Missions Travel Guide is very useful for details about the 21 missions, 5 sub-missions, 5 presidios and 4 ranches.

It is from this inspiration that modern Mission Revival Style architecture emerged.

Excessively Diverting Blog Award winners

The aim of the Excessively Diverting Blog Award is to acknowledge writing excellence in the spirit of Jane Austen’s genius in amusing and delighting readers with her irony, humour, wit and talent for keen observation. Recipients will uphold the highest standards in the art of the sparkling banter, witty repartee, and gentle reprove. This award was created by the blogging team of Jane Austen Today to ack­now­­ledge superior writing over the Internet and promote Jane Austen’s brilliance.

Here are my nominees:

1. At My Soiree. This blog is indeed sophisticated, intelligent and interesting. One of the few bloggers who write as if their readers were educated and thoughtful.

2. Emm in London. Fabulous text and images from modern and historical London, arguably the most exciting city on earth.

3. Your Brisbane: Past and Present. The foto fanatic has found historical material about Brisbane that I would have thought was lost for all time. Super duper blog.

4. ThinkShop. A surprise and pleasure - long, thoughtful articles on history, politics and literature, just about my favourite mixture of disciplines.

5. Edwardian Promenade. Evangeline is covering topics that are becoming more and more interesting to my reading. And she covers them in depth.

6. The Textile Blog. The posts are long, detailed and a total pleasure to read. If I was putting my favourites in order, I would put this one near the top.

7. The Victorian Era. Great topics and lots of informative text and images. Despite my years studying renaissance and early modern history, the Victorian and Edwards blogs I have nominated have changed my focus entirely. What joy!

7. History and traditions of England. I couldn't leave out a blog that finds _my_ all-time favourite historical questions and writes them up beautifully. And the images are always spot on.

Recipients, please claim your award by copying the HTML code of the Excessively Diverting Blog Award badge, posting it on your blog, listing the name of the person who nominated you, and linking to their blog. Then nominate seven (7) other blogs that you feel meet or exceed the standards set forth. Nominees may place the Excessively Diverting badge in their side bar and enjoy the appreciation of their fellow blogger for recognition of their talent.