Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin: Life, Icones & Botanical Prints

Who Was Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin?

Jacquin was a scientist first and a picture maker by necessity. He described hundreds of plants new to European science, and he knew that a careful, coloured picture taught other botanists more than any Latin description. So he hired the best plant painters in Vienna and published their work in large folio books, paid for in part by the emperor. The prints in our Jacquin collection come from the most famous of those books, the Icones Plantarum Rariorum, or “Pictures of Rare Plants”.

How to spot a Jacquin plate:

1. One plant on a white page: the whole plant, often with its bulb or roots, on a clean ground with no scenery, such as the Amaryllis longifolia with its striped bulb.
2. Script caption: the Latin name in copperplate script at the foot of the sheet, with a short reference such as “Jacq. Coll. vol. 4”, which points to the book where Jacquin first described the plant.
3. Small dissections: a seed, a cut flower or a stamen drawn to one side, as botanists needed.
4. Soft, natural colour: hand-coloured engraving with greens, rose pinks and violets, never overworked.
5. Rare plants of the day: Cape bulbs, pelargoniums, tropical peppers and euphorbias, Alpine flowers and new arrivals from the Americas and Asia.

From Leiden to Vienna

Jacquin was born in Leiden on 16 February 1727, the son of Claudius Nikolaus Jacquin, a cloth manufacturer of French descent, and Elisabeth Maria Heyningen. He studied medicine at Leiden University, where Theodor Gronovius encouraged his interest in plants, and then went to Paris, where he heard Antoine de Jussieu lecture on botany.

After his father died in 1743, the family doctor stepped in. Gerard van Swieten, a fellow Leiden man who had become physician to Empress Maria Theresa, invited Jacquin to finish his studies in Vienna. He arrived in 1752 and spent his free hours in the imperial gardens at Schönbrunn, where the emperor, Francis I, was building a great collection of exotic plants.

The Caribbean Expedition

In 1754 Francis I sent Jacquin to the West Indies to collect living plants, seeds, animals and minerals for Schönbrunn. He spent nearly five years travelling, with stops in Martinique, Jamaica, Cuba and the Caribbean coast of South America, and shipped back crates of plants for the imperial hothouses.

The tropics were hard on his collections. Insects destroyed much of his dried herbarium, so Jacquin relied on the drawings he made in the field. Back in Vienna he turned them into Selectarum Stirpium Americanarum Historia (1763), a history of selected American plants with 183 engraved plates. Around 1780 he issued a luxury edition with 264 plates painted by hand instead of printed; the Morgan Library records that only 18 copies were made.

The plants of the Americas stayed with him all his life. The Icones holds many of them, from the bromeliad above to the Hibiscus domingensis, the sensitive cassia, tropical peppers such as Piper clusiaefolium and the cockleshell orchid, Epidendrum cochleatum.

Schemnitz and the Vienna Botanical Garden

In 1763 Van Swieten found him a post as the first professor of chemistry and mineralogy at the mining academy in Schemnitz, now Banská Štiavnica in Slovakia. Jacquin taught there for five years, grew plants in his spare time and began his Observationum Botanicarum. In 1768 he returned to Vienna as professor of botany and chemistry at the university and director of its botanical garden, and he later also oversaw the imperial gardens at Schönbrunn.

Jacquin was a friend and correspondent of Carl Linnaeus, and he did much to bring Linnaeus’s system of naming plants into the Habsburg lands. He also wrote a chemistry textbook (1783) and played the flute. In 1774 he was ennobled as “Edler von Jacquin”.

His books grew bigger and grander. Hortus Botanicus Vindobonensis (1770–1776) showed plants of the Vienna garden in 300 plates, many painted by Franz Scheidl, and Florae Austriacae (1773–1778) filled five volumes with hand-coloured plates of the wild plants of Austria.

The Wulfenia grows wild in only a few Alpine valleys of Carinthia, and Jacquin gave it its name in 1781. Other Austrian and Alpine plants in the Icones include the monkshood Aconitum tauricum, the wood pink and the military orchid.

Icones Plantarum Rariorum

The Icones Plantarum Rariorum came out in parts in Vienna from 1781 to 1793 and was bound in three folio volumes. It has 648 numbered plates; library catalogues such as the National Library of Ireland’s note that the real count is 649 sheets. Each plate shows a plant that was rare or new, most of them growing in the Vienna gardens, and the caption points to the book where Jacquin had described it, usually his Collectanea or Miscellanea Austriaca.

Jacquin did not draw the plates himself. The Biodiversity Heritage Library credits them mainly to Joseph Hofbauer, the brothers Franz and Ferdinand Bauer and Johann Scharf. The Bauer brothers worked in Vienna before going on to fame in England: Franz as the botanical painter at Kew and Ferdinand as the artist on Matthew Flinders’s voyage around Australia.

Some of the best-loved garden flowers have their scientific names from this book. Jacquin published Zinnia elegans, the common zinnia, in the third volume in the early 1790s. The Camellia japonica below was still a rarity in European gardens.

Cape Bulbs and Pelargoniums

Flip through the Icones and South Africa keeps appearing. In 1786 Emperor Joseph II sent the gardeners Franz Boos and Georg Scholl to the Cape of Good Hope to collect for the imperial gardens, and Scholl stayed on for years, sending plants back to Vienna. Bulbs from the Cape flowered in the Vienna hothouses, and Jacquin had them drawn.

In our collection the biggest groups are Cape plants: 42 gladiolus plates, 35 pelargoniums, 23 lachenalias and 21 ixias. Look for the scarlet Gladiolus tubulosus, the spotted Lachenalia tigrina, the blue and purple Ixia rubrocyanea, Eucomis bifolia, whose two broad leaves lie flat on the ground, and pelargoniums such as Pelargonium patulum, wild relatives of the potted “geraniums” on today’s windowsills.

Jacquin also wrote a whole monograph on Oxalis, the wood sorrels, many of them from the Cape; the Oxalis versicolor in the Icones shows one of them.

Mozart and the Jacquin Family

Jacquin married Catharina Schreibers, the daughter of a Vienna city official, and they had two sons and a daughter: Joseph Franz (1766–1839), Gottfried (1767–1792) and Franziska (1769–1850). Their house in Vienna was a place for music.

Gottfried was a close friend of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who wrote two songs, K. 520 and K. 530, that Gottfried published under his own name. Franziska was Mozart’s piano pupil, and his “Kegelstatt” Trio for clarinet, viola and piano is linked to the family: it was first played at the Jacquins’ home, with Franziska at the piano.

Later Years and Legacy

Jacquin retired in 1797, and his son Joseph Franz took over his chair. He kept publishing. Plantarum Rariorum Horti Caesarei Schoenbrunnensis (1797–1804) showed the rare plants of Schönbrunn in four volumes and 500 plates, drawn by Johann Scharf and Martin Sedelmayer. The young Alexander von Humboldt studied his collections in 1797 before setting out for the Americas. Jacquin was made a baron in 1806 and died in Vienna on 26 October 1817, aged 90.

Botanists still meet him daily. His author abbreviation, “Jacq.”, follows hundreds of plant names, and the genera Jacquinia and Jacquiniella honour him. In 2011 the Austrian Mint struck a silver coin for his Caribbean voyage.

His books sit in the great age of botanical art alongside those of Georg Dionysius Ehret, who worked with Linnaeus, and Pierre-Joseph Redouté in Paris. Franz Bauer, who drew for Jacquin in Vienna, went on to paint the Cape plants of Kew in Delineations of Exotick Plants.

Famous Jacquin Plates

Nine plates to start with, all in our collection:

Rhododendron

Rhododendron ponticum. A full truss of lilac flowers above a whorl of long leaves, the boldest plate in the set.

Camellia

Camellia japonica. Deep rose flowers on a glossy branch; small, simple and elegant.

Zinnia

Zinnia elegans. The garden zinnia, named by Jacquin, in rose pink.

Mango

Mangifera indica. A mango branch with flower sprays, a cut seed and a ripe red and yellow fruit.

Bromeliad

Bromelia humilis. Spiky leaves around a red heart, striking and modern.

Wulfenia

Wulfenia carinthiaca. The Carinthian Alpine flower, on a wide fold-out sheet.

Passionflower

Passiflora incarnata. A purple maypop flower with its green fruit; see also the copper passionflower.

Scarlet gladiolus

Gladiolus tubulosus. Arching red tubular flowers on a tall stem, a graphic Cape bulb.

Tiger lachenalia

Lachenalia tigrina. A Cape bulb with leopard-spotted leaves and a head of pink tubular flowers.

What Our Jacquin Prints Show

All 649 prints in our collection are plates from the Icones Plantarum Rariorum, titled with the plant’s Latin name as it appears on the plate, such as “Zinnia elegans”. Jacquin used 18th-century names, so some plants have since been renamed; the Anthericum and Ornithogalum plates, for example, include South African bulbs now placed in other genera. The set covers 265 genera.

For colour, start with the Cape bulbs and the tropical flowers. For a quieter look, the grasses, ferns such as the polypodiums and the Alpine plants have a fine, linear beauty.

How to Decorate with Jacquin Prints

• Living room: a pair of bold plates such as the rhododendron and the mango either side of a sofa or fireplace.
• Bedroom: soft pinks and violets, such as the camellia, the zinnia and the Amaryllis longifolia.
• Kitchen: edible plants, from the grapevine and the mango to tropical peppers such as Piper clusiaefolium.
• Hallway or stairs: the tall, narrow Cape bulbs, such as Gladiolus tubulosus and Ixia polystachya, hung in a vertical row.
• Gallery wall: a grid of six or nine plates reads like pages from a folio; mix in Ehret, Redouté or Franz Bauer, or browse all botanical art prints.
• Frames and mats: white or cream mats match the paper; thin oak, walnut or gilt frames suit the 18th-century plates.
• Sizes: the plates are tall folio sheets, so portrait sizes such as 12×18 or 24×36 inches fit best; the fold-out Wulfenia suits a wider frame.

Frequently Asked Questions