Raspberry 

University of Oregon Special Collections and University Archives. For a digitization of the entire book, see:

https://oregondigital.org/catalog/oregondigital:df735x09c

Thornton, Robert John. A New Family Herbal or Familiar Account of the Medical Properties of British and Foreign plants also their uses in Dying, 1814, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene, Oregon. QK99 .A1 T56.

At first glance, this illustration of a raspberry bush may seem ordinary. But for the nineteenth-century eye, the sole red berry leaps off the page from its stark white backdrop. Physician and botanist Robert Thornton describes his work as “humble,” but these hand-painted images were at the time quite controversial. Thornton’s book was largely influenced by the work of Carl Linnaeus, someone who stood in firm opposition to most visual representations, and to color. As a result, many botanical texts had taken a step back from color, including Linnaeus' own publications, which included no images at all.  For Thornton, it was “humble” in contrast to his previous works that were filled with saturated illustrations of plants in rich landscapes. But in his “family” herbal, Thornton seeks to make the work of Linnaeus palatable to a less wealthy and learned readership . With this audience in mind, Thornton used the newly developed and cheaper wood-engraving method (in contrast to copperplate engraving) to keep costs low. We do not see the full-scale Linnaean influence one might expect, like imagery of botanical sexual anatomy, but each plant does have a brief description of its Linnaean classification to gradually acclimate the reader. Nowadays, we tend to think of Linnaeus as inherently famous, but it was actually works like Thornton’s that  helped establish his scientific authority for a broad public in competition with the many other taxonomic systems available at the time. 

Aviva Kaye-Diamond