The Gardens Trust presents a series of six online talks on Mondays from February 7 – March 14 at 1 pm Eastern time, exploring the extraordinary life and work of John Bradby Blake (1745 – 1773). Zoom access to each lecture may be purchased for £5 each or all 6 for £24. Each lecture is recorded and a link will be sent, accessible for one week, for those who have a time conflict. These Gardens Trust lectures have been uniformly excellent, and purchase through Eventbrite may be accessed by clicking HERE.
John Bradby Blake’s life was short but exceptional. During a span of only three years in the southern Chinese port city of Canton, Blake and his Chinese artist(s) produced several hundred exquisite, botanically accurate, colored drawings of Chinese plants, many of which were unknown in the West. Hidden from public view for more than two centuries, these singular and historically crucial collaborative artistic creations have only recently resurfaced.
This series of six illustrated talks, focusing on the botanical drawings, will lead you into a previously unknown world in London and Canton, which Blake participated in and shaped. It will explore the many meanings of the material results of a rich and unique cross-cultural encounter which continued to reverberate for decades after his death.
Our speakers, who have worked closely together on the Blake drawings and associated, scattered manuscripts and texts (in Chinese and western languages), are experts in the fields of botany, art history, garden history and the history of science; and they come to you from the United Kingdom, the United States and Taiwan.
The first talk on February 7 is entitled An Englishman Abroad: An Introduction to the Life and Times of John Bradby Blake, with Sir Peter Crane FRS, Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia. Sir Peter writes: I first encountered the name of John Bradby Blake about a decade ago. Later, arriving at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, I was surprised to discover a large archive of Bradby Blake material among the rare books and manuscripts assembled by the philanthropist Rachel Lambert Mellon. This unpublished archive, which includes a collection of more than 150 magnificent plant portraits, provides a rich insight into the activities of an emerging botanical scholar who was working as a trader for the British East India Company in Canton and Macau in the early 1770s.
