Plant to printed image: Helichrysum

This sequence of images relating to the yellow immortelle, a plant frequently grown as a garden plant, shows how a once-living plant may have been used as the model for an illustration in Part 3 of the Historia. The specimen (mounted on late-seventeenth-century paper), from the Morison herbarium labelled in the hand of Jacob Bobart the Younger, has two samples strapped to it. One sample is attributed to ‘C. Foster’, whilst the other is mounted below a pen-and-ink sketch drawn, and formally labelled, within the boundary of a plate mark (the upper label is in Bobart the Younger’s hand). Around the edge of the main sketch is a detached leaf and a pair of closed flowerheads. It is possible that the flowerheads of the plant sample are those reproduced in the drawing.

Examination of the sketch, for example, around the edges of the lower leaves reveals score marks that are consistent with the outline having been traced – the first step in the process of transferring an image to a copper plate for engraving. The tracing was placed on the copper plate in the same orientation as the original drawing, although the leaf and flowers have been rearranged, for engraving. Consequently, when the copper plate was printed the image was reversed relative to the original.