Les Vélins du Roi
Les Vélins du Roi is a collection of 6984 paintings of plants and animals started in 1631 to document specimens from the royal garden and animal collection. Foremost illustrators contributed to the codex during the reigns of Louis XIII, Louis XIV and Louis XV, and the codex was finally entrusted to the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in 1793, where it still is.
According to Ernest Hamy, the Muséum has a "collection of flowers painted by Jean Le Roy de la Boissière", 1610, consisting of 44 watercolour-illuminated vellums, 39 cm × 29 cm; reference Ms 2224) acquired for the Muséum in 1888 by Joseph Deniker. These pages are “sometimes decorated on one side only, and sometimes on both sides, with very fine paintings representing flowers, insects, etc.”. Le Roy devotes some twenty pages to tulips, presents a few fruits, and adds a few insects and snails here and there.
A smaller vellum depicting an iris made in Poitiers in 1608 by one Van Kuyk, a pupil of van Kessel appears in the Cleveland Museum of Art which presents it as a page from a florilegium commissioned by Le Roy in 1608 and illustrated by several artists, perhaps including himself. Hamy recalls that Le Roy's talent was celebrated by the poet and apothecary, who said: "Du Sieur de la Boissière, Architas Poitevin, / Timanthe sans égal, dont la dextre savante, / fait tout ce que nature à notre œil représente.
In the same article, Hamy mentions Daniel Rabel, painter, engraver, miniaturist and botanist. From 1618, Rabel painted his Suite de fleurs. The volume contains one hundred vellums, 239 painted images of plants and 32 of insects. The work entered the royal collections in 1783.
1622 saw the publication of Theatrum florae In quo ex toto orbe selecti mirabiles venustiores ac praecipui flores tanquam ab ipsus deae sinu proferuntur: 69 engraved plates of flowers and insects. Some of the plates were illuminated. According to Hamy, the same collection was presented to the public in 1627, attributed to, then in 1633 to Pierre Mariette. Although the Suite was published later, it seems that the engravings were based on the miniatures.
It seems that the museum also has six vellum prints dated 1631 and 1632 that could be by Daniel Rabel.
The painter-miniaturist Nicolas Robert worked for Gaston, Duke of Orléans from 1631, after the miniatures he painted for the famous Guirlande de Julie had made him famous. The Prince, who had no doubt employed Rabel, took him into his service to produce miniatures on vellum after the plants grown in the Jardin du Luxembourg, then in the garden of the Château of Blois where Gaston had founded a botanic garden and cultivated a wealth of rare plants. The director of the gardens, Scottish botanist Robert Morison, is believed to have inspired Robert to illustrate the resident plants. Gaston of Orléans died in 1660, bequeathing his collections to his nephew, Louis XIV, who lodged them at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Colbert encouraged Louis to continue making what became the King's vellum collection. In 1664, Nicolas Robert obtained a new position, that of ‘Peintre ordinaire du Roy pour la miniature’. From then on, he used as models the plants indicated to him by the naturalists of the and the birds of the Royal Menagerie of Versailles. We owe him more than 700 miniatures on vellum, nearly 500 of which have plants as their subject. The vellum miniatures are held by the Museum, and the printed ones by the Bibliothèque Nationale. He also contributed to the . On his death, he was succeeded by Louis de Chastillon who, in addition to his artistic work, was a draughtsman for the French Academy of Sciences. He worked with a number of medical doctors and, in botany, with Guy de La Brosse, Denis Dodart and Robert. Jean-Baptiste Massé studied under him. was Robert's pupil and assistant for miniature painting and engraving.
Robert's successors as painters of the plants in the royal botanical garden were Jean Joubert, who was assisted by Claude Aubriet. Aubriet had previously accompanied Joseph Pitton de Tournefort to the Middle East; Tournefort commissioned him to illustrate his celebrated Elemens de Botanique . Aubriet also provided the illustrations for the 1727 edition of Sébastien Vaillant's Botanicon parisiense.
Françoise Basseporte was a pupil of Aubriet, whom she succeeded in 1743. She taught floral miniature painting to the daughters of Louis XV. Among her pupils were Marie Marguerite Bihéron and Pierre-Joseph Redouté, who was also a pupil of Gerard van Spaendonck, who, born in the Netherlands and arriving in Paris in 1769, became miniaturist at the court of Louis XVI in 1774 and Basseporte's successor in 1780. He enriched the King's vellum collection with more than fifty works. In 1793, he was appointed to the chair of natural iconography at the newly created Muséum national d'histoire naturelle: it was to train miniaturist painters, now specialised in botany or zoology and recruited by competition; their works now had an explicitly scientific purpose. He was also responsible for the 'Fleurs Dessinees d'apres Nature', 24 plates engraved by for student painters. He also illustrated the 'Annales du Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle' and painted flower still lifes. He, of course, had many students: Pierre Antoine Poiteau, Jean Henri Jaume Saint-Hilaire, Antoine Chazal, Henriëtte Geertruida Knip, Jan Frans van Dael, Piat Joseph Sauvage, Charlotte Eustace Sophie de Fuligny-Damas, and especially Pancrace Bessa and the Redouté brothers.
Pierre-Joseph Redouté, nicknamed 'the Raphael of flowers', was Marie-Antoinette's painter, worked at the Muséum, went to Kew Gardens, returned to draw for the Academy of Sciences, became Joséphine de Beauharnais's painter, then gave drawing lessons at the Muséum. We are indebted to him for a large number of first-class works. Of particular note is a catalogue of flowers, Description des plantes nouvelles et peu connues, cultivées dans le jardin de J. M. Cels. Avec figures, showing exotic plants cultivated by the gardener Cels. The author is the botanist Étienne Pierre Ventenat. One of P-J Redouté's students was Henriette Vincent. In the preface to Les Roses, Redouté briefly reviews the history of botanical illustration since antiquity. He then concentrates on the history of the depiction of roses.
Henri-Joseph Redouté was a painter at the Muséum, then took part in the Commission des Sciences et des Arts during the "Expedition to Egypt", in the company of botanists such as, and Raffeneau-Delile - the latter being responsible for the botanical plates in the Description de l'Égypte, illustrated with engravings taken from Redouté's watercolours on Bristol paper.
. In the column on the left, look for "Collection d'images" and click on "Collection des vélins du Muséum national d'histoire naturelle "
In 2016 the firm of Citadelles & Mazenod published a 624-page volume depicting 800 of the plates from the collection.