This sketch is a design for a drawing meant to serve as a title page for an album of drawings of flowers & plants by various artists. The collector of these drawings, Agnes Block (1629-1704), commissioned at least 4 such albums, for which Philip Tideman (1657–1705), a Dutch Golden Age artist, drew befitting title pages.
Agnes, or Agneta Block (1629-1704) was a Dutch Mennonite art collector & horticulturalist. She is most remembered as the compiler of albums of flower paintings, especially her Florilegia. The term florilegia applied literally to a treatise on flowers dedicated to ornamental beauty rather than the medicinal uses of plants covered by Herbals. The emergence of botanical illustration as a genre of art dates back to the 15C, when Herbals were printed containing illustrations of medicinal herbs & flowers. As printing techniques advanced, & new plants came to Europe from Ottoman Turkey in the 16C, wealthy individuals commissioned artists to record these exotics in Florilegia. Florilegia flourished in the 17C, when they were created to portray rare & exotic plants collected in private gardens from worldwide exploration & colonization. Florilegia are among the most lavish & expensive of books because of all the work required by the artists hired to produce them.
Agnes, or Agneta Block (1629-1704) was a Dutch Mennonite art collector & horticulturalist. She is most remembered as the compiler of albums of flower paintings, especially her Floriligia. Agneta Block was the daughter of a Mennonite textile merchant. She 1st married Hans de Wolff (1613–1670), a silk merchant, in Amsterdam in 1649; & after he died, in 1674 she remarried in Amsterdam Sijbrand de Flines (1623–1697).
After the death of her first husband, Agneta bought a country estate on the Vecht river in Loenen, which she proceeded to decorate with a large collection of curiosities, including the gardens, which were planted with exotic plants. She enjoyed drawing & painting in water colors, & her garden lent itself to this hobby.
Her country estate, built as farmstead about the middle of the 17C, she bought in 1670 after the death of her husband. There she specialized in collecting exotic plants and became famous for growing tropical fruit. She succeeded as the first botanist in the Netherlands to bring a fruit-bearing Surinamese pineapple to flower.
To embellish her albums, she hired artists to paint her exotic plants for her albums. She commissioned many artists from her time to portray them, including Johannes Bronckhorst, Willem de Heer, Herman Henstenburgh, Maria Sybilla Merian and her daughter Johanna Helena Herolt-Graf, Herman Saftleven, Pieter Withoos, & Philip Tideman (1657–1705), a Dutch Golden Age artist
Agnes Block was in regular correspondence with other horticulturalists such as Jan Commelin (1629-1692). The botanist Commelin was a specialist in exotic plants & helped to establish the botanical garden in Amsterdam (the ‘Hortus Medicus’) where such species were cultivated.
Throughout the 17C, Dutch merchants traveling & trading in the East & West Indies brought back to the Netherlands specimens of new & exotic plants. The spectacular frontispiece to this catalog of the plants found in the botanic gardens in Amsterdam provides an allegorical depiction of the supreme role the city played in the botanical world at the time.
Seated in the center of a beautiful garden, the city of Amsterdam receives plants from the 4 corners of the world (left), the bounty of which is then distributed to the everyday people of the town.
The botanist Jan Commelin helped to establish the botanical garden in Amsterdam where they could be cultivated & observed by the general public. The 1st volume of this catalog was published in 1697 & contains finely illustrated hand-colored depictions of the plants found in the garden.
The illustrations in this volume were mostly made by the accomplished botanical artist Jan Moninckx (c. 1656-1714) & his daughter Maria, though some others were completed by Johanna Helena Herolt (1668-1723), the eldest daughter of Maria Sibylla Merian.
