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Natural beauty

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 26th March 2008

Amazing Rare Things
The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 28 September

Then comes Alexander Marshal (c.1620–82), gentleman gardener, who only painted for his own amusement, but turned out the most exceptional plant drawings for his florilegium or flower book. This Sunday painter produced a marvellous image of a dead jay, portrayed realistically as if lying against a painted page of spring flowers. Here are purple crocuses, daffodils and hyacinths — everything we’ve recently seen in our gardens. Botanical illustration has had a bad press, as if it were the sole province of strange spinsters tinkering about with vellum. Marshal’s auriculas or flag irises give the lie to that. Nearby a cabinet of 41 etchings of exotic shells (the South African Turban, the Snipe’s-bill Murex) by Wenceslaus Hollar offer timely monochrome diversion. The final featured artist is Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), a great artist–naturalist and explorer (she courageously visited Surinam to study the insects and plants), whose works are more intricate than the others’, and have a slightly hallucinatory quality. Look, for instance, at her ‘Water hyacinth and marbled tree frogs’.

If you have time, and Amazing Rare Things is not an extensive exhibition (though you may wish to linger over these exquisite drawings), do take a look in the main galleries for the current selected highlights from the Queen’s Collection. I paid an affectionate greeting to such old favourites as Artemisia Gentileschi’s self-portrait and Annibale Carracci’s ‘Head of a Man in Profile’ (a fine characterisation this, and a ravishingly brisk bit of painting), before settling for a few minutes’ reverie in front of Gainsborough’s magnificent ‘Diana and Actaeon’ (c.1786). It’s a late painting by the Suffolk master (he came from Sudbury, as did Mark Catesby —- is it something in the water?) and his only mythological subject. Here is the fruit of a lifetime spent looking and making pictures. The handling is wonderfully assured and fluid, the modelling loose but exact. It is Gainsborough talking to himself, for his own enjoyment and interest, a private painting or rather a large sketch of beautifully grouped nudes in a lyrical landscape. What a painter.