Botanical Model Of A Poppy Flower (papaver Rhoeas) By Robert Brendel

Botanical Model of a Poppy (Papaver rhoeas) by Robert Brendel.
Papier-mâché and wood.
Germany.
ca. 1870.
h. 11,4 in.

Botanical model of a poppy (Papaver rhoeas), designed in the Robert Brendel workshops in Breslau around 1870.

The Robert Brendel workshops gained great renown during the second half of the 19th century for their scientifically accurate botanical models of flowers and plants, hand-painted in wood and paper mâché. The small business received numerous medals and awards in the years following its founding, across the Western world: in Moscow in 1872, in Cologne in 1890, in Chicago especially, during the famous World’s Fair of 1893, and again, seven years later, at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Brendel's botanical models were celebrated for nearly half a century for their educational value and usefulness in teaching botany at universities in Europe and America.

Most of Brendel’s flower models, which are extremely rare and fragile, are now preserved in natural history museums or in the collections of a few European universities. They can be found in collections such as those of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., the universities of Bologna and Florence, the National Museum of Liverpool, and the University of Lille.

This particular model is part of one of the earliest models created by Robert Brendel in Breslau with the help of pharmacist Carl Leopold Lohmeyer and botanist Ferdinand Julius Cohn. More aesthetic than didactic, this model was replaced by a double-clastic model by the late 1870s, showing the fully bloomed flower as well as a cross-sectional view. Therefore, this poppy is one of the very first Brendel flowers, dating likely from the early 1870s.

Sources

Alexander Tschirch, Erläuterungen zu den botanischen Modellen von Robert Brendel, Berlin, 1885 ; Reinhold Brendel, Preisliste über Botanische Modelle gefertigt und herausgegeben von R. Brendel, Berlin, 1900 ; Grazinia Fiorini, Luana Maekawa, and Peter Stiberc, “Save the Plants : Conservation of Brendel Anatomical Botany Models,” Florence, 2008.