# - Botanical drawings–[?Huet, Jean Baptiste.

4to (310 x 265mm.), 117 botanical drawings in watercolour and gouache (each approx 200 x 160mm.) showing European and American cultivated plants, mostly agricultural crops, early nineteenth-century ?French half morocco over marbled boards 

Condition is described in the main body of the cataloguing, where appropriate
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finely-executed eighteenth-century botanical drawings of agricultural plants. Most show flowers, seeds or fruits, stems and leaves when relevant, and also a few roots. They cover about thirty-five different genera, including a wide variety of grains (two show six ears of corn), beans and peas, as well as tobacco, an opium poppy, flax, potato, aubergine, cabbage, sunflower, clover, grass and other crops. A few show mould and ergot infections. Traces of the underlying sketches in black crayon are often visible.

Each drawing has been cut down to its simple ink border (nos. 1-66) or just outside it (nos. 67-117), and the corners pasted down on the album leaves. Many contain contemporary numbers in brown ink, ten with the date 1787, and a few show traces of the French plant name in ink or black crayon.

According to Sam Segal, "the execution is very artistic. In a couple of cases the artist provides a shaded background, for example with the white flowers of an opium poppy (no. 45), which make a splendid contrast with the background in various shades of grey. As a result, the whole, with its grey-green leaves and fruits, is harmoniously recorded in related tonal values". The artist cannot be identified with any certainty, but several drawings by Jean Baptiste Huet (1745-1811) in Paris resemble the present ones in style, inscriptions, subject matter and format (see, for example, his drawing of pumpkins in the exhibition catalogue, France in the Eighteenth Century, London 1968, no. 342).

We are grateful to Sam Segal for his assistance in the cataloguing of this lot.