Botanical Model of a Lily flower (Lilium martagon) by Robert Brendel

Papier-mâché and wood.
Germany.
ca. 1870.
h. 43 cm (16.9 in).

Papier-mâché model of a lily (Lilium martagon) created between 1866 and 1880 in the workshops of Robert Brendel.

Robert Brendel developed the eponymous flower models in 1866 as teaching tools for German faculties of pharmacy and botany. Often dubbed ‘clastic’, meaning they could be disassembled, Brendel’s flowers—alongside an increasing number of models of various plants, algae, and fungi—made it possible to teach floral anatomy to a wide audience in all seasons, at a time when photography had limited applications in academic settings.

The reputation of the Brendel workshops, founded in Breslau in 1866 and named after their founder Robert Brendel, continued to grow during the final decades of the 19th century. When Robert Brendel died in 1898, his son, Reinhold Brendel, took over the workshops. By that time, the Brendel models had reached the height of their fame, adding a medal awarded at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle to the long list of distinctions received under Robert’s leadership: Moscow in 1872, Cologne in 1890, and notably Chicago in 1893.

Rare and fragile, most Brendel flower models are now housed in natural history museums or in the collections of prestigious universities. They can be found, for example, in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and at the universities of Bologna, Florence, and Cambridge, as well as at the National Museum of Liverpool and the University of Lille.

This model comes from the collections of the Botany Department [Botanische Abteilung] of the Landwirtschaftliche Akademie Liebwerd, an agricultural school founded in 1850 under Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. It was renamed the Landwirtschaftliche Akademie Tetschen-Liebwerd (Royal Agricultural Academy of Tetschen-Liebwerd) in 1880. Since the Brendel models in this series are labeled "Liebwerd" and not "Tetschen-Liebwerd," we can confidently date them to before 1880.

This model is therefore part of the earliest series of Brendel flower models, made no later than the late 1870s.

Sources

Alexander Tschirch, Erläuterungen zu den botanischen Modellen von Robert Brendel, Berlin, 1885 ; Preis-Verzeichniss der von R. Brendel, Berlin W., Kurfürstendamm 101, angefertigten botanischen Modelle, Berlin, 1885 ; Grazinia Fiorini, Luana Maekawa, and Peter Stiberc, “Save the Plants: Conservation of Brendel Anatomical Botany Models,” Florence, 2008.