Botanical Sketchbooks: (over 500 years of beautiful botanical sketches by 80 artists from around the world, from Leonardo da Vinci to John Muir)

Recording the world of plant and animal life and documenting the strange beauty of the natural world have been human passions ever since the first cave paintings. While there are many histories of botanical art featuring beautiful paintings and finished drawings, the artists' preparatory sketches, first impressions, and scribbled notes on paper are rarely seen. But it is often these early attempts that give us real insight into the firsthand experiences and adventures of the botanists, artists, collectors, and explorers behind them.

This exquisite visual compendium of botanical sketches by eighty artists from around the world brings these personal and vividly spontaneous records back into the light. Filled with remarkable images from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, sourced from the unparalleled collections of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Library, Art & Archives, and other libraries, museums, and archives, Botanical Sketchbooks also provides fascinating biographical portraits of the intriguing characters featured within, including such renowned artists, scientists, and amateur botanists as Leonardo da Vinci, Georg Dionysius Ehret, Carl Linnaeus, Maria Sibylla Merian, Mark Catesby, and Helen and Margaret Shelley (sisters of the novelist Mary Shelley), among many others.

• Explorers' Sketchbooks: The Art of Discovery & Adventure
• A Garden Eden / Ein Garten Eden / Un Jardin d'Eden: Masterpieces of Botanical Illustration / Meisterwerke der Botanischen Illustration / ... Botanique (Multilingual Edition)
• The Art of Botanical & Bird Illustration: An artist's guide to drawing and illustrating realistic flora, fauna, and botanical scenes from nature
• Botanical Drawing: A Step-by-Step Guide to Drawing Flowers, Vegetables, Fruit and other Plant Life
• Botanical Drawing in Color: A Basic Guide to Mastering Realistic Form and Naturalistic Color
• Botanical Drawing Using Graphite and Coloured Pencils
• Wise Trees
• Kew Book of Botanical Illustration, The
• Joseph Banks' Florilegium: Botanical Treasures from Cook's First Voyage
• Botanical Sketchbook