Botanical Model of a Flowering Rush (Butomus umbellatus) by Brendel

Papier-mâché and wood.
Germany.
ca. 1900.
h. 45 cm (17,7 in).

This botanical model, representing a flowering rush (Butomus umbellatus), was designed at the beginning of the 20th century in the workshops of Reinhold Brendel in Grünewald, near Berlin. This small manufactory, originally founded in Breslau in 1866 by Robert Brendel, became renowned as early as the 1870s for the production of so-called "clastic" models. These detachable structures allowed for the study of the internal organization of plants, revealing anatomical and microscopic details invisible to the naked eye on a considerably enlarged scale.

Crafted from papier-mâché, wood, wire, and plaster, this model is hand-painted (polychromed) with water-based pigments and likely coated with a shellac varnish. It belongs to the second production phase of the manufactory, which began after 1898 when Reinhold Brendel succeeded his father and moved the business to Grünewald. This period is distinguished by the adoption of more understated ebonized wood bases, which replaced the molded and varnished bases of earlier series.

The quality of Brendel models was celebrated at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, following successes achieved under Robert Brendel in Moscow (1872), Cologne (1890), and Chicago (1893). Today, these rare and fragile artifacts of natural science education are primarily preserved in prestigious institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the universities of Bologna, Florence, and Lille, as well as the National Museum Liverpool.

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