The Last Fruits: Abraham Jacobus Wendel and the Art of Pomological Illustration

There is a particular melancholy to pomological illustration. The fruits depicted in the great botanical atlases of the 19th century — the pears, the apples, the plums, the cherries — were not generic specimens. They were named varieties: the Beurré d’Anjou, the Reinette Grise, the Morello, the Doyenné du Comice. Many of them no longer exist in commercial cultivation. The orchards that grew them have been grubbed up, replaced by varieties selected for shelf life and uniformity rather than flavour or beauty. What remains are the illustrations.

Abraham Jacobus Wendel was born in Amsterdam in 1826 and trained as a botanical illustrator at a moment when the discipline was undergoing a quiet revolution. The development of chromolithography in the mid-19th century made it possible, for the first time, to reproduce colour illustrations at scale without hand-colouring each copy individually. Publishers commissioned lavish botanical atlases. Scientific institutions funded illustrated catalogs of their collections. The illustrated natural history book became both a scientific instrument and a luxury object.

The Pomological Tradition

Pomology — the science of fruit cultivation — had its own illustrative tradition, distinct from the broader field of botanical illustration. Where botanical illustration prioritised the accurate depiction of plant morphology (roots, stems, leaves, flowers, seeds), pomological illustration focused on the fruit itself: its external appearance, its cross-section, its colour at different stages of ripeness. The goal was identification — a grower needed to be able to look at a plate and recognise the variety in front of them — but the best pomological illustrators understood that identification and beauty were not in conflict.

Wendel’s Nederlandsche flora en pomona, published in 1879, stands at the apex of this tradition in the Netherlands. The work catalogued Dutch fruit varieties with the systematic rigour of a scientific publication and the visual ambition of an art book. Each specimen was rendered with attention to surface texture — the bloom on a plum, the russeting on an apple skin, the translucency of a gooseberry — and to the particular quality of light that distinguishes one variety from another.

Before Photography

The timing of Wendel’s work is significant. By 1879, photography was already transforming scientific illustration in many fields. But fruit photography presented specific challenges: colour reproduction was not yet possible, and the three-dimensional quality of a fruit — its roundness, its surface variation, the way light moves across it — was difficult to capture with the photographic technology of the period. Botanical illustration retained its scientific utility for longer in pomology than in almost any other field.

Within a generation, that utility would be gone. Colour photography, and later digital imaging, made illustrated atlases of this kind unnecessary as scientific instruments. What they became instead was something else: a record of varieties, of ways of seeing, of a horticultural world that was already beginning to disappear when Wendel was drawing it.

What Remains

The heritage fruit movement of recent decades has recovered some of what was lost — old orchards have been documented, forgotten varieties propagated from surviving specimens, seed banks established. But the illustrated atlases remain the most vivid record of what these fruits looked like at their peak: not the desiccated specimens of a herbarium, but living fruit, rendered with the full resources of 19th-century illustration at its finest.

Wendel’s plates are not merely historical documents. They are, in the most straightforward sense, beautiful — and beauty, as the pomological illustrators understood, is itself a form of knowledge.

Our Heritage Fruits Mini Book presents a curated selection of Wendel’s fruit illustrations in a compact, collectible format — twenty pages of pomological art, built to be handled and displayed. 

References

• Wendel, Abraham Jacobus. Nederlandsche flora en pomona. 1879.
• Lack, H. Walter. Garden Eden: Masterpieces of Botanical Illustration. Taschen, 2008.
• Pavord, Anna. The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants. Bloomsbury, 2005.
• Morgan, Joan & Alison Richards. The New Book of Apples. Ebury Press, 2002.