This was the age of the philosophers Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire, of John Hume, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant, of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. It was also a time of great scientific advancement, enabled by an unprecedented combination of rational thought and empirical observation.
Franz I, the Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria, was one of the so-called ‘enlightened despots’ who recognised the national prestige to be won through the pioneering achievements of Enlightenment intellectuals. It was in this spirit that he invited Nikolaus von Jacquin to conduct an expedition to the Americas and bring back exotic plants and animals for his garden and menagerie at Schönbrunn Palace, on the outskirts of Vienna.
Jacquin left Vienna in 1754 and spent the following five years collecting, recording and shipping back specimens from across the Caribbean region – Martinique, the Leeward Islands and Antilles, Jamaica, Cuba and the Colombian coast. In the course of his voyage Jacquin’s herbarium was destroyed by termites, prompting him to make drawings in situ of the species he had discovered – the originals from which many of the beautiful plates of Plants of the Americas were painted. He endured the looting and burning of his ship by English pirates, contracted and then shook off yellow fever, and at one point fell from a cliff and landed on a cactus. For all his sufferings, the expedition proved a resounding success: shells, fossils, corals, plants, birds and small mammals were transported back to Schönbrunn, and Jacquin had succeeded both in discovering many new species and in correcting numerous taxonomical errors.
On his return to Europe, Jacquin’s publications secured his reputation as a botanist – the ‘Ambassador of Flora’ in the words of Carl Linnaeus – but something greater was in store. In 1780 he published the second edition of Plants of the Americas. This book, referred to variously as the ‘deluxe’, ‘luxury’, ‘extravagant’ or ‘eccentric’ edition, was a true meeting of science and art, with breathtaking results – 264 hand-painted plant portraits of extraordinary detail and accuracy, prefaced by a title page of exuberant beauty.