Botanische Wandtafeln & inadvertent
abstract artist extraordinare.
These images are University instructional posters. They come from a series entitled Botanische Wandtafeln (1874-1911) by Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny (1841-1916).
Consisting of 120 lithographs and an accompanying textbook, Botanische Wandtafeln (botanical blackboards), is an epic work of both research and mushroom/fern art that took 37 years of Kny’s life to creatre.
One amongst many wallchart sets produced in Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this one is acknowledged as being by far the best.
These large format wall charts provided an effective method of visually transmitting information in German school and university classrooms, which by the 1870s were becoming increasingly crowded, following educational reforms in the mid nineteenth century that greatly increased student numbers.
As well as Kny, two printmakers and more than ten artists were involved in creating the colour and black-and-white prints. The charts depict the anatomy, morphology and systematics of plant life in great detail, and were enormously popular not only in Germany, but across Europe.
on which Puccinia graminis has developed.
illustrating the development of the embryo of Alisma plantago.
