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Lot 35
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Nicolas Robert Watercolor on vellum, Aloe succotrina Lam - Commissioned by Louis XIV For Versailles.
Nicolas Robert Watercolor on vellum, Aloe succotrina Lam - Commissioned by Louis XIV For Versailles.
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ROBERT, Nicolas (French, 1614-1685).
Aloe succotrina Lam. (Fynbos aloe / “Aloe succotrine”).
Pencil, watercolor, and body color on prepared vellum, with pencil, gold, and brown ink framing lines.
ca. 1670.
17" x 12 1/2" vellum, 27" x 22 1/8" framed.

Watercolors commissioned by Louis XIV For Versailles.

Robert’s drawing Aloe succotrina records an early stage in the European reception of the Cape flora and likely predates the published figures of this plant by Munting (1680) and Commelin (1697).

Here, the artist depicts a single flowering stem from a rosette of thick, fleshy, recurved leaves, whose margins are armed with regularly spaced, pale, deltoid teeth. The dense, conical raceme is composed of pendulous tubular flowers in a graded sequence: the still-closed buds, deeper coral at the apex, and softer pink at the base, from which the slender stamens and stigma protrude. The artist has rendered each phase of blossoming, allowing the viewer to read the inflorescence as a sequence in both time and space. The specimen is set against the plain vellum ground and bounded by the thin gilt fillet that became the signature framing device of the royal collection. The illustration follows the conventions Robert established for the vélins with rigorous fidelity to the living model and luminosity achieved through layered translucent washes over careful underdrawing in black chalk.

Aloe succotrina Lamarck is endemic to a narrow strip of the southwestern Cape of South Africa, occurring primarily on the Cape Peninsula, notably the cliffs and boulder fields of Table Mountain, and eastward along the coast as far as Mossel Bay. It is one of only a handful of aloes adapted to what is referred to as “fynbos vegetation.” Fynbos is a distinctive, biologically diverse type of shrubland vegetation found only in the Western and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa. Meaning "fine bush" in Afrikaans, it forms the backbone of the Cape Floral Kingdom and is renowned for housing over 8,500 plant species, many of which are completely unique to the region. Growing high on rocky outcrops, seasonal fires do not reach it, protecting this unique biome. The species flowers in the southern winter (June to September), producing the tall raceme of coral- to pink-tubular flowers that are pollinated by sunbirds, notably the Orange-breasted, Southern Double-collared, and Malachite Sunbirds.

The specific epithet succotrina is a misnomer. Early European authors, unable to determine where the cultivated plant originated, assumed it came from the island of Socotra off the Horn of Africa, the classical source of the medicinal "aloe socotrina." The error persisted until 1905, when the botanist Rudolf Marloth encountered a wild colony while climbing Table Mountain.

The arrival of Aloe succotrina in Europe is bound up with the establishment of two modes of exchange in South Africa. First, the refreshment station of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) at the foot of Table Mountain. Their garden at the Cape was founded to provision ships rounding the southern tip of Africa on the route to Batavia, and quickly became the primary clearing house through which Cape succulents entered European cultivation. Dutch sailors carried living plants and seeds back to Amsterdam through the second half of the seventeenth century, where they were received and propagated at the Hortus Medicus (founded 1638) and at the private gardens of wealthy amateurs such as Caspar Fagel at Leeuwenhorst, whose collections in turn supplied botanists across the continent. Second, French commerce would have supplied a parallel channel through the Compagnie française des Indes orientales, chartered in 1664, which regularly stopped at the Cape and could likewise have served as a conduit for living material to the royal garden. Thus, the plant would have reached French gardens through these active exchange networks linking the Hortus Medicus in Leiden to the Jardin Royal des Plantes médicinales.

The earliest published figure of the species appears in Abraham Munting's Waare Oeffening der Planten (True Practice of Plants) of 1680, where it is named Aloë vera minor (lesser true aloe); a confirmed flowering in European cultivation was recorded in 1689, and Jan Commelin gave the first proper description in the Horti medici Amstelodamensis rariorum plantarum historia (History of the Rarer Plants of the Amsterdam Medical Garden) in 1697.

That a flowering specimen was available to Robert in Paris during this period is itself of botanical-historical interest, since the cultivation of Cape aloes in northern European glasshouses was at that date a considerable horticultural achievement. Whether Robert painted this sheet at Blois in Gaston's lifetime, which would place it among the very earliest European depictions of the species, or, more probably, at the Jardin du Roi after 1660, the vellum stands as a document of the seventeenth-century traffic in plants that carried the southern African flora northward in the holds of Dutch and French East Indiamen.

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