Impressions of Nature - A History of Nature Printing

Impressions of Nature: A History of Nature Printing by Roderick Cave, published by the British Library, 2010 Photograph: British Library

The earliest nature print, on a leaf inserted into a manuscript of Dioscorides, copied in Anatolia or northern Syria by Bihnam the Christian in AD1228. Whether this leaf is contemporary or was inserted later is still debated, and no other examples of nature printing from the Islamic world have come to light
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Fern impressions on a bark cloth, said to have been made by the Queen of Tahiti, collected in the Society Islands in the late 18th century
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Folio 197 verso of Leonardo da Vinci's Codice Atlantico is famous for his print of a sage leaf, accompanied by his recipe for making plant impressions
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The need to identify plants accurately was shared by several different occupational groups, including those who compounded scents and perfumes. One of the earliest surviving nature printed herbals was made in about 1520 by Zenobio Pacino, 'aromatarius' of Florence
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One of the most substantial collections of nature prints was made by Parisian botanist Jean-Nicolas de La Hyre (1685-1727). He produced highly finished, sophisticated prints, far from the simple aids to identification made by earlier botanists
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Sir Hans Sloane's cope of Albrect Dürer's print of a rhinoceros has been decorated front and back with nature prints of flowers and leaves
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Stephen Martin Leake (1702-73) made a volume called Impressions of Leaves, with samples gathered from his garden in Mile End in London. The botanical names for the plants were not supplied
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Opening from the first issue of Kniphoff's Botanica in Originali (1733)
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This rare uncut sheet of currency notes shows how nature printed notes were produced. The notes were printed in a single operation and then cut by hand afterwards
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From Hortus Gramineus Woburnensis, a book used by Darwin when writing The Origin of the Species
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The technique used in this print uses a new process developed by Marcellin Bonnet and his son. The details of this process were kept secret, but seems to have involved printing in intaglio with careful colouring of the image of the leaves before printing – a method usually associated with developments 40 years later
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From an Austrian study of meteorites. The book used a variety of nature printing seldom seen elsewhere: prints taken from slices of the meteorites where the section was etched with acid, then ink
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Photography was still a novelty when Anna Atkins produced her Photographs of British Algae. Very few people had seen examples of the cyanotype process - where a photographic printing process gives a cyan-blue print
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Alois Auer (1813-1869) is attributed with the invention of the process of nature printing. The Austrian printer was the first to publish instructions in four languages for the process in The Discovery of the Natural Printing Process: an Invention, Vienna, 1853. In this plate, he showed readers the different forms that nature prints can take – as well as prints from stone, wood, flowers, leaves, seaweeds and fabric, there are prints from snakeskin, and the tail of a petrified fish
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An early print by Henry Bradbury (1831-1860), among the foremost 19th century practitioners of nature printing. Best known for his works on British and Irish ferns, Bradbury studied at the Imperial Printing Office in Vienna under Auer, who had improved existing nature-printing techniques by introducing an electroplating technique. Bradbury patented his own version on return to London, without acknowledging that the idea had originated with Auer. This resulted in an acrimonious conflict over credit for the process. Bradbury committed suicide at the age of 29
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Lysimachia vulgaris, Great yellow loosestrife, from Henry Bradbury's folio A Few Leaves (1854). Bradbury and his partner Evans wanted to show off the quality of prints that could be made by their patented process. Like Auer before them, to secure the maximum publicity for it, they presented copies to everyone from the Pope to King Leopold I of Belgium
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Mauchline in Ayrshire, Scotland, was the centre for the production of a very large range of fern-decorated wooden objects which were sold all over the world in the 19th century. Enterprising publishers and booksellers embraced the trend and commissioned decorations on wooden boards that were used to bind a large range of books in the 1870s
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Magnolia glauca, from Edward Parrish's book The Phantom Bouquet, which describes how to reduce leaves to their skeletons and print them onto wood
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Richard Cockle Lucas (1800-83) was primarily a sculptor, but also an etcher and early experimenter with photography. His son, Albert Durer Lucas, was a flower painter whose work led the older man to experiment with making nature prints himself. In this print - featuring the town of Chilworth, where he retired - Lucas tried to catch the hues of the leaves he used. These prints are different as he approached nature printing from the viewpoint of an artist rather than a botanist
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Henry C. Baildon's Nature-Printed Ferns (1869). In 1867 Baildon patented a process using chromolithography to try to capture the tints of the original plants. But public reaction to his work was disappointing - the opacity of the inks made the prints appear less than lifelike
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Herbert Dobbie's cyanotypes (a photographic printing process that gives a cyan-blue print) are often described rather dismissively by writers on New Zealand botanic art, but they were very useful examples of pioneering enterprise
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Making transfers from the wings of butterflies and moths was probably as common with collectors on the continent as in Britain. The transfers could be made only from the scales on the wings, so the collector had to paint a representation of the insect's body on the sheet, and the more ambitious would also add details of the plants on which the insect would be seen. As a young man in Romania, in the mid-1880s Prince Aristide Caradja formed a small but particularly fine collection of such prints
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