Winged passionflower (Passiflora alata)

Sydenham Teak Edwards

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Born in Wales, Edwards moved to London in 1788 to design illustrations for Edward Curtis’s recently launched Botanical Magazine; or, Flower Garden Displayed. In this later work, he applied gouache to vellum to describe a South American passionflower, a combination favored by botanical artists since the Middle Ages as it allows for fine detail. The decision to place the subject against a developed landscape was probably influenced by Dr. Robert Thornton’s Temple of Flora (1799–1807). Edwards designed images for that groundbreaking series of colored aquatints, which use a similar format and were intended to illustrate Carl Linnaeus’s teachings about floral reproduction. A similar emphasis is placed on the subject’s stamens and pistils here.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art