Large Flowering Sensitive Plant, Plate 16
1799
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
1799
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Large Flowering Sensitive Plant, Plate 16 is a 1799 by Joseph Constantine Stadler, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a single, giant leafy plant with pink flowers and fuzzy red stems, drawn so big it fills the whole page. This isn’t just a pretty picture—it’s a science lesson. The plant is a *sensitive plant*, which curls up when touched. Back then, explorers brought strange plants from far away, and scientists like Carl Linnaeus tried to name and sort them. This print was part of a fancy book meant to show off the new system. If you like this, look up *england, late 18th-early 19th century* for more weird and wonderful plants from the same time.
Fueled by scientific and colonial expeditions that brought back plant specimens from across the globe, the science of botany blossomed in Enlightenment Europe. This print is from a sumptuously illustrated treatise known as The Temple of Flora . Commissioned and published by Dr. Robert John Thornton, a British medical botanist, the work illustrates the new plant classification system of Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus. Yet while these prints realistically depict buds, flowers, and leaves, they show them in environments where they did not actually grow. Instead, Thornton had the artists situate…
In The Temple of Flora , this print was accompanied by a scientific description and a poem written by Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather).
Read the full account in the museum source.
Joseph Constantine Stadler (1755–1828) was a German artist, born in Germany.
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