Are you ready? Our fourth annual #ColorOurCollections week kicks off today! From February 4th through the 8th, libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions are showcasing their collections in the form of free coloring sheets. Follow #ColorOurCollections on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other social media platforms to participate. If you’re a cultural institution, share your own coloring sheets to our website, colorourcollections.org. And if you’re looking for pages to color you can join in too, by following the social media hashtag. Be sure to visit the #ColorOurCollections website for free, downloadable coloring books created for the campaign.
Last year our coloring pages took their cues from the ocean, but this year’s especially cold January had us running to our botanicals. Here, we found a respite from the cold in the pages of Willem Piso’s natural history of Brazil, the vibrant cacti of Johannes Burman’s eighteenth-century volumes on American plants, and the always evergreen pines of the early and important herbal, the Hortus Sanitatis, or Garden of Health.
The earliest illustrations in this year’s coloring book come from a French edition of the Hortus Sanitatus, first published in Mainz in 1485. The woodblocks used to make the book’s many illustrations of plants and animals were reused many times to depict different species. In some cases, fantasy takes over entirely, as with a pair of images depicting male and female mandrakes.
Source: Verard, Antoine. Des herbis & tabulae… (1500).
Athanasius Kircher was also no stranger to fantasy, and his levitating lily pad, from his illustrated guide to China published in 1667, is no exception. Kircher, a Jesuit, never travelled to China, but relied on accounts by his fellow Jesuits for source material for his book. Kircher promised that his travelogue would distinguish between the real and the unreal, but offered illustrations of a number of incredible sights, including winged tortoises and this flower with a face, who graces this year’s coloring book cover:
Source: Kircher, Athanasius. Athanasii Kircheri e Soc. Jesu China…(1667).
Other images this year were taken from the herbal of the Dutch botanist, Johannes Burman, published between 1755–1757. Burman studied under Herman Boerhaave at Leiden, and qualified in 1728 as a doctor of medicine. He later replaced Frederick Ruysch as Professor of Botany in Amsterdam, and was responsible for the botanical garden there. Many of the illustrations in Burman’s Plantarum Americanarum were drawn by the French botanist and artist Charles Plumier (1646–1704). The flowering plant plumeria was named in his honor.
Source: Burmann, Johannes. Plantarum Americanarum. (1755–1757).
Finally, two additional coloring images come from Willem Piso and Georg Markgraf’s astonishing Historia naturalis Brasiliae, published in 1648. The book contains 446 remarkable woodcuts illustrating local flora and fauna, and comprises the most important seventeenth-century catalog of zoology, botany and medicine in Brazil. The woodcuts are based on an original collection of paintings and sketches, now lost; many of these original depictions were likely done by Markgraf himself. Selected pages from the book are digitized here.
Piso, Willem & Laet, Joannes de. Historia naturalis Brasiliae. (1648).
We can’t wait to see what you’re coloring from our collections—and from others! Don’t forget to share your work and use the hashtag #ColorOurCollections on social media.
Books, Health and History 