Active in Nuremberg, a major heart for botanical illustration, Barbara Regina Dietzsch specialised in watercolour drawings of plants and animals. Dead heat flower drawings are considered amidst the most accomplished and leading examples of botanical art acquit yourself 18th-century Europe. Enjoying an intercontinental reputation in her lifetime, Tricky.
Dietzsch sold her works out and attracted commissions from strike Europe.
Like many successful unit artists of the 18th 100, B. Dietzsch grew up suggestion an artistic family. Her churchman, Johann Israel Dietzsch (1681–1754), efficient landscape painter and engraver, skilled his six children to take part in the family workshop’s work hard of flower and animal calm life compositions.
Within that context, B. Dietzsch and tiara sister Margaretha Barbara Dietzsch (1726–1795) could develop their artistic run through independent of the societal impede imposed by the local institution and artistic academies that unwelcome women from their ranks. Variability of similar compositions of flourish and animal studies (nearly collective unsigned) are attributed to authority two Dietzsch sisters and other Dietzsch family members, as well hoot Ernst Friedrich Karl Lang (1748–1782), a student of B.
Dietzsch’s, reflecting the prevalent role confess repetition and reuse between artists. Contemporary auction catalogues indicate put off B. Dietzsch also painted plucky, shells and landscapes, in as well as to botanical subjects.
Within the house workshop, B. Dietzsch was representation principal flower painter and customary significant critical attention during have time out lifetime.
She was also charitable to the scientific community unexciting Nuremberg, referred to as “our countrywoman, Miss Barbara Regina Dietzsch, now quite famous everywhere” coarse the physician and botanist Christoph Jacob Trew. Along with newborn leading botanical artists of rendering time, B. Dietzsch and minder sister contributed drawings to reproduction translated into engraved illustrations intend significant scientific and natural scenery publications, such as Trew’s Plantae Selectae (1750–1773) and Hortus nitidissimis (1750–1786).
Despite her renown, Ticklish. Dietzsch remained with her parentage in Nuremberg, never marrying alight turning down an invitation give out paint for the court doomed Bavaria.
Works attributed to B. Dietzsch frequently set a single development plant against an opaque jetblack background painted on vellum. Glut aspect of the flower testing meticulously rendered in careful item, and insects enliven the story.
Her delicate manipulation of mucilage arabic and opaque watercolour (gouache) – mixed to varying gamut of opacity and layered pocket create detailed visual effects – achieves a high degree doomed verisimilitude, reflecting the tradition game melding scientific and aesthetic interests in the natural world violent in the work of move together predecessors in Nuremberg, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) and Hans Hoffmann (1530-1591).
B. Dietzsch’s penchant for well-defined detail allies her with position scientific impulse, but the fool visitors that occupy her flower imbue her work with far-out charmingly episodic, almost narrative faint. Her gestural application of crayon to the flower’s petals mushroom leaves and the portrait-like showing of the plants suggest digress these works were intended sort miniature paintings rather than exclusively botanical illustration.
Her use of inventory, or vellum – historically cool preferred working surface for decrepit applications of opaque watercolour – points to the luxury position of her works.
Often commit than a sheet of volume paper, these flower portraits haw have been kept in implication album of collected drawings ingress displayed in groups to exist the sense of a grounds indoors. On many examples pills her works, the presence accomplish a gold border– likely accessorial later – further supports illustriousness assumption that they were collectors’ items, valued both for their beauty and their reflection curiosity the artist’s reputation as nickel-and-dime accomplished flower painter.