{"product_id":"johanna-helena-herolt-german-1668-1723-love-in-a-mist-with-a-lime-hawkmoth","title":"Johanna Helena Herolt (German, 1668-1723), Love-in-a-mist with a Lime Hawkmoth","description":"\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003eJohanna Helena Herolt (GERMAN, 1668 - 1723)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003eLove-in-a-mist with a Lime Hawkmoth\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003eWatercolor and bodycolor on vellum\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003ePaper size 9 1\/2 x 7 1\/2 in.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003eFrame size 15 1\/2 x 13 1\/4 in.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003e#AP02567\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003eThe subject of this delicate watercolor is Nigella damascena L. (Love-in-a-mist), depicted in its double-flowered cultivated form, and Mimas tiliae (Linnaeus, 1758), the Lime Hawkmoth.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003eNigella damascena belongs to the buttercup family Ranunculaceae and is an annual flowering plant native to the Mediterranean basin, including southern Europe, North Africa, and southwestern Asia. Its species epithet, damascena, alludes to Damascus, Syria, reflecting the plant’s eastern Mediterranean range. The flower is distinguished by its pale blue or white petals, surrounded by a ring of finely dissected, thread-like bracts that give the plant its common English name. As Dr. Sam Segal observed, it is “a species of the Mediterranean area, in cultivation since 1542, originally only in its simple form, since the end of the 16th century also in double forms, like the variety in this watercolor.”1 The double-flowered form depicted here, with its densely layered petals and pronounced collar of bracts, became fashionable in Northern European gardens from the late sixteenth century onward.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003eMimas tiliae is a member of the family Sphingidae (hawkmoths) and is found across a broad arc from the British Isles and Scandinavia eastward through continental Europe and into western Asia. Its common name derives from its primary larval food plant, the lime or linden tree (Tilia spp.), though the caterpillar also feeds on elm (Ulmus), birch (Betula), alder (Alnus), and related deciduous trees. The adult moth is instantly recognizable by its strongly scalloped forewing margins and the irregular mosaic of olive-green, pink, and dark brown that marks its wings, all of which are faithfully rendered in the present watercolor. Adult moths possess only vestigial mouthparts and do not feed; their brief lives are devoted entirely to reproduction. The species flies at dusk and at night during late spring and early summer. Segal noted that the Lime Hawkmoth is “a European moth, becoming rare since,” attributing its decline in part to changes in planting practices: “Lime is far less planted as a lane or park tree now as it was in former centuries.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" align=\"center\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eJOHANNA HELENA HEROLT (GERMAN, 1668–1730)\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003eJohanna Helena Herolt, born Graff on May 1, 1668, in Frankfurt, was a botanical artist whose career unfolded at the intersection of Dutch Golden Age science and collecting culture. The eldest daughter of Maria Sibylla Merian and the painter and engraver Johann Andreas Graff, she received her artistic training within one of the most accomplished natural history households in early modern Europe. The family relocated to Nuremberg in 1670, and Johanna learned to draw and paint under both parents, absorbing her father’s draftsmanship alongside her mother’s meticulous attention to plant life and insect metamorphosis. In 1686, Merian left her husband and moved with Johanna, her younger sister Dorothea Maria, and their grandmother to the Labadist community at Waltha Castle in Wiewerd, Friesland. The Labadists, a pietist Protestant sect founded by Jean de Labadie (1610–1674), offered the women an unusual degree of autonomy outside the conventional domestic sphere. After their grandmother’s death in 1691, the family moved to Amsterdam, by then the center of global trade and home to the era’s foremost natural history collectors. Johanna married the merchant Jacob Hendrik Herolt on June 28, 1692, an ex-Labadist with extensive trading connections in Suriname.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003eThe late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw an extraordinary convergence of botanical inquiry and artistic patronage in the Dutch Republic. As European collectors competed to document the exotic flora arriving through the Dutch East India Company, demand grew for scientifically precise yet visually compelling natural history imagery. Women played a central role in this enterprise. Both Merian and Herolt worked for Agnes Block (1629–1704), the wealthy Mennonite collector and horticulturalist known as “Flora Batava.” Block had transformed her estate at Vijverhof on the River Vecht near Utrecht into the foremost privately cultivated garden of the era, commissioning hundreds of watercolors to document her rare specimens. She also contributed botanical watercolors to the Amsterdam Hortus Medicus (Hortus Botanicus), forming part of the contributors to the monumental Moninckx Atlas. For Block, Herolt’s entomological fluency was commercially as well as scientifically essential: the historian Ella Reitsma has observed that the market price for flower watercolors rose in direct proportion to the number of insects depicted, making this skill a measurable asset.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003eHerolt worked primarily in watercolor and gouache on vellum, the standard support of the Merian workshop. In 1987, the art historian Sam Segal described her as “the eldest daughter and finest pupil of Maria Sibylla Merian,” noting her capacity for compositions of rare vividness and delicacy.2 Her style is more Baroque than her mother’s: brighter in palette, richer in surface, and attentive to imperfection in ways that give her subjects a quality of arrested life. Wilted stalks, curling leaf blades, and early signs of decomposition appear alongside freshly opened blooms. Many works in the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, and the Rijksmuseum, long attributed to Merian, have since been reattributed to Herolt through stylistic and technical analysis; Segal alone has reattributed thirty of ninety-one folios in the British Museum to one or both of Merian’s daughters.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 0in;\"\u003eIn 1711, Herolt relocated to Paramaribo with her husband, who had become director of an orphanage there. In Suriname, she collected reptiles, fish, and insects, dispatching specimens to Amsterdam for sale to European collectors, and continued to observe and paint the colony’s tropical flora and fauna firsthand. When Dorothea Maria edited the posthumous third volume of their mother’s Der rupsen begin, midden en einde (The caterpillars beginning, middle, and end) in 1717, she announced a forthcoming appendix of Surinamese insects observed by Johanna, writing: “Including an appendix with Surinamese insects observed by my sister Johanna Helena Herolt, currently residing in Suriname, and not doubting that this will be agreeable to the one or the other reader.”3 The supplement was never published, its fate unresolved. Reitsma has attributed to Herolt the most powerful compositional templates among the Surinamese plates, including the fig branch (plate XXXIII) and the papaya tree (plate XL). Johanna Helena Herolt died in Paramaribo on October 9, 1730, fifteen years after her husband. She was a superb natural history artist whose contributions to the visual documentation of European and tropical flora have long been obscured by the extraordinary renown of her mother.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Arader Galleries","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43061519515709,"sku":null,"price":22000.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1208\/8894\/files\/herolt_LoveinamistwithaLimeHawkmoth.jpg?v=1774464270","url":"https:\/\/aradergalleries.com\/products\/johanna-helena-herolt-german-1668-1723-love-in-a-mist-with-a-lime-hawkmoth","provider":"Arader Galleries","version":"1.0","type":"link"}