It will thus be seen that, apart from Holmskjold's special and particular predilections, there were general and national impulses directed towards this work of exceptional character and of European importance. It may readily be imagined that, prior to the advent of the Flora Danica service, the artists at the royal factory who painted flowers had, under the vigilant eye of the specialist director, to paint them from nature. A convolvulus did not become so decoratively treated as to evade identification. The Greek honeysuckle pattern of conventional use would not have passed at Copenhagen. Conventionality was as much eschewed in decoration as was the rococo in modelling. It is thus evident that nature and nature study, so remarkable and beautiful a feature in Copenhagen porcelain, owes not a little to the trained scientific vision of Theodor Holmskjold, the botanist.
Other factors enter into the question of the consideration of this Flora Danica service. It is obvious that the national feeling in artistic and scientific circles was centred on nature and nature study. Jean-Jacques had shown mankind that Dame Nature was capable of being wooed with intense passion. It was not until the late eighteenth century that the beauties of landscape began to be assiduously sought after. Travellers crossed the Alps from one country to another and regarded the frowning mountain, the sombre pass, or the rushing torrent much in the same manner as the unpoetic mariner feared the hurricane. Nature in her majestic loneliness was appalling. The sunny slopes of the Apennines concealed volcanic terrors. The smile of the blue Lake of Como was as treacherous as the dancing waves of the fickle sea itself. Lakes and mountains and mountain gorges were to be avoided; no mortal had conceived the idea of discovering their beauty. They were as fearsome as the Pillars of Hercules to the Latin mariners.
CRUET STAND.
From Flora Danica service made for Catherine II of Russia.
(At Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen.)
In England, Thomas Gray, the poet, made a journey into Westmoreland and Cumberland in 1765 to see the Lake Country. His letters are the first note in English literature of man's kinship with nature. It took a century for the modern thought to germinate—"great men are part of the infinite, brothers of the mountain and the sea." As early as 1739, Gray's letters to his mother are filled with passages extolling the grandeur of the crags and precipices of the Alps, at a time when Rousseau had not developed his later method, and Vernet had only commenced to paint the turbulent sea with ecstasy.
In Denmark, in 1790, when the first model of the Flora Danica service was turned on the potter's wheel, this inquiring and reflective spirit was in the air, and the general tendency manifestly found a reflex in the great national service being manufactured at the Royal Porcelain Factory. The Russian Government had already entered into co-operation in a small degree in regard to bringing the records of the Russian flora into line with that of Denmark, and Catherine II, as is known, was the patron of the German naturalist Dr. P. S. Pallas, who, in 1784, commenced a Flora Russica, which was to eclipse anything yet attempted. This was to be published at the expense of Catherine. At her wish Pallas had in 1768 undertaken a scientific expedition to Siberia, which occupied six years.
In this connection, therefore, and knowing the Empress Catherine to be a votary of science and of art, the services made in England, France, and Denmark for imperial use were not undertaken without due consideration of this fact. The Sèvres service was embellished with the art of the schools of Boucher, Lancret, and Watteau; the Wedgwood service was frankly topographical, having painted copies, in mulberry purple, of old engravings, and Copenhagen was designedly botanical, based on the coloured illustrations of the Flora Danica volumes.