Drawing of the Month #10

Johanna Helena Herolt (Frankfurt am Main 1668 – ca. 1723/43 Suriname)

Yellow and Purple Verbascum, with the Life Cycle of a Moth, ca. 1691 – 1711

Watercolor, over black chalk, on parchment, 380 x 300 mm. The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, Promised gift of Clement C. and Elizabeth Y. Moore

Sarah Mallory, Annette and Oscar de la Renta Assistant Curator of Drawings and Prints at the morgan library & Museum, New York, has kindly chosen our tenth drawing of the month.

Now on display at The Morgan Library & Museum, in the exhibition ‘Far and Away: Drawings from the Collection of Clement C. Moore,’ is an ethereal watercolor drawing, done by Johanna Helena Herolt (née Graff ), depicting three stems of verbascum (perhaps moth mullein, or Verbascum blattaria) and the lifecycle of a moth. Though the flowers appear to be quite delicate, as if their petals might drift away on a breeze alongside the moth, Herholt’s work in fact reveals the enduring power of drawings to connect people and places near, far, and away.

Herolt, alongside her sister Dorothea Maria Graff, trained at the knee of her parents, Maria Sybilla Merian and Johann Andreas Graff, who were themselves apprenticed to Merian’s stepfather, the eminent flower painter Jacob Marrel. In this finely executed work, we see Herolt continue the natural history drawing tradition begun by the Merian lineage. Three gracefully curving stems fill the page, guiding the eye up the cache of tiny blossoms amid which we see the life cycle of an owlet moth. Herolt likely drew the picture using preserved specimens and her apt imagination. Indeed, the harmonious placement of moth and plant is an idealized vignette intended to show the subjects’ various developmental stages, a feat of synchronicity that would never transpire in nature.

Herolt likely produced this drawing while living in Amsterdam, from 1691 to 1711. During this period, she made flower books and also drawings for Agnes Block and the Hortus Botanicus of Amsterdam. The express purpose of this sheet is yet unknown, but it might well have once been part of a flower book or album. In the “Bloem Boek,” an album of forty-nine Herolt watercolor drawings of flowers dated to ca. 1698, the artist included a drawing of a stem of verbascum alongside two stems of Jacob’s ladder.

Verbascum, thought of as a flowering weed, was not a common subject in florilegia, which more often featured ornamental blossoms (irises and peonies, for example). The plant was, however, a mainstay of herbals, including De materia medica, which was written in 50–70 CE by Greek physician Dioscorides, subsequently copied for millennia, and remained highly influential in early modern Europe. Many of the earliest surviving copies of De medica are on parchment and depict verbascum; Herolt’s drawing, also on parchment, is thus a profound link in the long chain of artistic tradition wrought from the study of nature.

So important was the verbascum as a treatment for an array of ailments—ulcers, dysentery, barren wombs, pleurisy—European colonizers cultivated the plant in the Americas, where it still grows. Herolt would have encountered mullein in her daily life; she was also likely familiar with herbals, such as John Gerard’s The Herball; or, Generall Historie of Plantes (1597), which notes that moth mullein had no obvious use except to attract bugs. Herolt’s drawing can but confirm and refute his assertion, for in her remarkable drawing of this workaday weed we experience the allure of reciprocity between insect, plant, and artist.

‘Far and Away: Drawings from the Clement C. Moore Collection’ at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, continues until 22 September.