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These two watercolours were part of a remarkable album of drawings sold at auction in 2005 and subsequently dismembered by its purchaser (Sotheby’s, New York, 26 January 2005, lot 46). The album comprised 81 leaves, including a frontispiece decorated with an elaborate architectural cartouche and a poem, as well as 80 finely executed watercolour and bodycolour studies of flowers and fruits. The frontispiece, now with Arader Galleries in New York, bears the French inscription ‘M’a este donne par Du Many’ providing an important clue to the album’s provenance. Scholars have suggested that a possible former owner was Toussaint-Theodore Du Many (1686-1744), canon of the Cathedral of Tournai. At the time of his death Du Many owned several paintings of still-life paintings featuring fruits and flowers (M. Kornell and D. Margóscy, ‘‘A Spring of Immortal Colours’. Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (c.1533-1588) and Picturing Plants in the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, LXXXVI, 2023, p. 125). The drawings in the album sold in 2005 have traditionally been attributed to Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues on the basis of their close relationship to several manuscript florilegia associated with or attributed to the artist. Comparable works include an album of 59 botanical watercolours in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (inv. AM.3267Z-1856–AM.3267HH-1856); a group of 50 sheets in the British Museum, London (inv. 1962,0714.1.1–1962,0714.1.51); and an album of 60 watercolours in the Oak Spring Garden Library, Upperville, Virginia (inv. MS0109). More recent scholarship, however, has reassessed the authorship of some of these works and proposed alternative attributions for several of them (for a recent discussion see Kornell and Margócsy, op. cit.). French by birth but British by adoption, Le Moyne led a colourful, adventurous and at times dramatic life. Born in Dieppe, he was dispatched to Florida by the French King Charles IX in 1564 as a cartographer with the French colonial expedition. Le Moyne later wrote an account of the venture, which ended in tragedy when Spanish forces seized the colony and massacred many of its inhabitants (P. Hulton, The Work of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues: A Huguenot Artist in France, Florida, and England, London, 1977, 2 vols.). Shortly after his return to France, Le Moyne, a Huguenot, saw himself forced to flee again, this time to England, where Sir Walter Raleigh became his most important patron, and prompted him to produce a book about his experience in the New World, published by Theodor de Bry under the title Brevis narration jorum quae in Florida, Americae provincia Gallis acciderunt (Frankfurt, 1591). In 1586, shortly before Le Moyne’s death, another book La Clef des champs, was published in London, with woodcut illustrations of plants and animals based on his designs.These two elegant compositions are conceived almost as miniatures, meticulously arranged within illusionistic frames and executed on specially prepared paper. One side of each sheet was stone-glazed prior to the execution of the drawings, a process that involved burnishing the surface with a heavy stone to create a smooth, polished finish resembling vellum.Studies of flowers and fruits such as the two presented here were created for amateur botanists and aristocratic collectors who wished to possess not only a record of the rare and exotic plants cultivated in their gardens—at a time when horticulture was becoming increasingly fashionable—but also objects of considerable artistic refinement. The brief poem, handwritten on the frontispiece of the album from which these two drawings derive, suggests a deeper significance for the illustrations (transcribed and translated in Kornell and Margócsy, op. cit., p. 125). By celebrating the beauty of flowers while contrasting the transience of living plants with the enduring nature of their painted representations, the poem underscores the artist’s ability to preserve nature’s fleeting splendor through art.

JACQUES LE MOYNE DE MORGUES (1533-1588)

A Globe Artichoke (Cynara scolymus)

Details

JACQUES LE MOYNE DE MORGUES (1533-1588)
A Globe Artichoke (Cynara scolymus)
black chalk, watercolour and bodycolour on paper prepared as vellum, framing lines in pen and brown ink, watercolour and gold paint
7 5⁄8 x 5 ¾ in. (19.5 x 14.7 cm.)

Provenance

Du Many (according to an inscription on the frontispiece of the album in which the present sheet was included).
Anonymous sale; Sotheby’s, New York, 26 January 2005, part of lot 46.
Arader Galleries, New York.
Acquired from the above.

Literature

P. Bower, ‘Magical Illusion: Two Collections of Watercolours by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (c1533-1588)’, The Quarterly. The Journal of the British Association of Paper Historians, no. 74, 2010, pp. 7-11.
M. Kornell and D. Margóscy, ‘‘A Spring of Immortal Colours’. Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (c.1533-1588) and Picturing Plants in the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, LXXXVI, 2023, p. 122, note 43 (as among the numerous sheets ‘attributed to or associated with Le Moyne’ needing to be ‘reassessed').

Conditions of sale

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Lot Essay

A domesticated variety of the wild cardoon (Cynara cardunculus), the artichoke began to be cultivated in southern France and Italy in the late 15th and early 16th Centuries. The plant was introduced into England in the first quarter of the 16th Century, and by 1530 artichokes were being grown in Henry VIII’s garden at New Hall in Essex.

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