Thirty-seven drawings of plants and flowers and a drawn frontispiece

The talented, although little known, Roman artist Baldassare Cattrani worked for many years as a botanical illustrator in the prestigious Botanical Garden in Padua. Many of his drawings of plants found their way into the collection of Eugène Beauharnais, probably via his mother, the Empress Josephine, who apparently had invited Cattrani to join the group working in the gardens of her country estate at Malmaison. In May 1935 at a sale held in Zurich the library of Eugène Beauharnais, containing twenty-four volumes of botanical drawings in bodycolor by Cattrani executed around 1806, was dispersed (Braus-Riggenbach and Ulrico Hoepli, Zurich, 23 May 1935, lot 71). Some of those drawings are now in the collection of Oak Springs, VA (Tongiorgi Tomasi, op. cit., no. 59).

Among the drawings presented here is a beautifully decorated manuscript frontispiece which provides important information on these sheets. The drawings are dated to 1806 and were executed in the Botanical Garden in Padua when Cattrani was working for its director Giuseppe Antonio Bonato (1753-1836).

The drawings are beautifully composed and carefully rendered, showing that at this point in his career the artist was an accomplished master. Another fine group of botanical drawings on vellum by Cattrani was sold at auction in 1998 (Christie’s, London, 11 November 1998, lot 27).