The Golden Fruit: Köhler, d'Orbigny, and the Botanical Illustration of Citrus

The lemon arrived in Europe from Asia sometime in the first millennium, carried along the trade routes that connected the Mediterranean world to the civilisations of the East. By the nineteenth century, it had been cultivated in the gardens of southern Europe for so long that it seemed native — as much a part of the Mediterranean landscape as the olive or the vine. It had also, by then, attracted the attention of the botanists and illustrators who were systematically documenting the plant kingdom with a thoroughness and a visual ambition that had no precedent in the history of science.

The nineteenth century was the golden age of botanical illustration. The combination of improved printing technology — particularly the development of chromolithography, which allowed the reproduction of full-color images at a quality and scale previously impossible — and the expansion of European natural history institutions created the conditions for a flowering of botanical publishing that produced some of the most beautiful scientific books ever made. Two of the most important of these publications, from two different national traditions, turned their attention to the citrus fruits of the Mediterranean: Franz Eugen Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen (1887) and Charles Henry Dessalines d’Orbigny’s Dictionnaire Universel d’Histoire Naturelle (1841–1849).

Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen: German Medicinal Botany

Franz Eugen Köhler was a German pharmacist and publisher who conceived and produced one of the most ambitious botanical publishing projects of the nineteenth century: a comprehensive illustrated encyclopedia of medicinal plants, published in Gera-Untermhaus between 1883 and 1898. The Medizinal-Pflanzen in naturgetreuen Abbildungen mit kurz erläuterndem Texte — Medicinal Plants in True-to-Nature Illustrations with Brief Explanatory Text — eventually ran to four volumes and more than four hundred plates, each one a chromolithograph of exceptional quality produced by the Gera printing house from drawings by a team of botanical artists including W. Müller, C.F. Schmidt, and K. Gunther.

The tradition within which Köhler worked was that of German Pharmakognosie — the scientific study of medicinal plants and their active constituents — which had been one of the central concerns of German-speaking natural history since the sixteenth century. The great herbals of the Renaissance — Fuchs, Bock, Brunfels — had established the convention of combining precise botanical illustration with practical information about medicinal use, and Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen stood in direct continuity with this tradition, updated for the scientific standards and printing capabilities of the late nineteenth century.

The plate depicting Citrus medica — the citron, known in German as Zitronatzitrone, Cedrat, medischer Apfel, and Judenapfel — is among the most striking in the collection. The citron is the oldest of the cultivated citrus fruits, known to have been grown in the Mediterranean since antiquity and mentioned in classical sources from Theophrastus onward. Its fruit is large and fragrant, with a thick, deeply furrowed rind and relatively little juice — it was valued in the ancient world primarily for its rind, which was used in perfumery and medicine, and for its symbolic significance in Jewish religious practice, where it is known as the etrog and used in the festival of Sukkot. Köhler’s illustrators rendered it with the characteristic precision of the German medicinal botany tradition: the fruit in cross-section and whole, the flower, the leaf, the branch — every part of the plant documented with the thoroughness that a pharmacist or physician would require.

D’Orbigny’s Dictionnaire Universel: French Natural History

Charles Henry Dessalines d’Orbigny (1806–1876) was a French botanist and geologist who spent much of his career at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. He is perhaps best known as the younger brother of Alcide d’Orbigny — the great French naturalist whose eight-year expedition to South America in the 1820s and 1830s produced one of the most comprehensive natural history surveys of the continent ever undertaken — but Charles Henry was a significant scientist in his own right, and his Dictionnaire Universel d’Histoire Naturelle, published between 1841 and 1849, was one of the most ambitious encyclopedic natural history projects of the mid-nineteenth century.

The Dictionnaire covered the entire natural world — mineralogy, geology, botany, zoology — in thirteen volumes of text and three atlases of plates, with contributions from many of the leading French naturalists of the period. The botanical illustrations, produced in the tradition of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, combined scientific accuracy with the elegance of line and composition that characterised the best French natural history illustration of the era. The plate depicting Citrus Limonium — the lemon — shows the fruit, the flower, the leaf, and the branch with the clarity and precision that the encyclopedic format demanded, rendered in a style that is at once scientifically rigorous and visually refined.

Two Traditions, One Fruit

What is striking about the Köhler and d’Orbigny citrus illustrations, placed side by side, is how much they reveal about the different national traditions of botanical illustration from which they emerged. The Köhler plate has the solidity and thoroughness of the German medicinal botany tradition — every part of the plant documented, every detail rendered with pharmacological precision, the whole image conveying a sense of the plant as a useful object, a source of medicine and commerce. The d’Orbigny plate has the elegance and compositional refinement of the French natural history tradition — the plant rendered as a beautiful object as much as a useful one, the illustration designed to be looked at as well as consulted.

Together, they represent the two great streams of nineteenth-century botanical illustration — the utilitarian and the aesthetic, the German and the French, the medicinal and the encyclopedic — united by their shared subject: the citrus fruits that had been cultivated in the Mediterranean for two thousand years and that continued, in the nineteenth century as in the twenty-first, to bring brightness and fragrance to the gardens and kitchens of the world.

If the history of botanical illustration and the beauty of nineteenth-century natural history resonate with you, the Lemon Journal brings Köhler’s 1887 citron and d’Orbigny’s 1841 lemon to a hardcover journal — 150 lined pages, ready for whatever your days require.

References

• Köhler, F.E. Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen in naturgetreuen Abbildungen. Gera-Untermhaus, 1883–1898.
• d’Orbigny, C.H.D. Dictionnaire Universel d’Histoire Naturelle. Paris, 1841–1849.
• Blunt, W. & Stearn, W.T. The Art of Botanical Illustration. Antique Collectors’ Club, Woodbridge, 1994.
• Lack, H.W. Garden Eden: Masterpieces of Botanical Illustration. Taschen, Cologne, 2008.
• Tolkowsky, S. Hesperides: A History of the Culture and Use of Citrus Fruits. John Bale, Sons & Curnow, London, 1938.