A Comparison Of Salvador Dali And Basilius Besler

Although Salvador Dali and Basilius Besler were artists in two very different times, there is a resemblance and continuity between the two paintings, Hasty Plum and Hyacinths. Basilius Besler created engravings of plants that he came across. He is considered one of the world’s first botanists. The engraving Hyacinths depicts different types of Hyacinths, with one being larger as the focal point. This larger flower is in full bloom. He made many engravings back in the 1600’s for the Prince Bishop of Eichstätt, Germany who had the first comprehensive botanical garden devoted to flowering plants. Besler depicted flowers in all four seasons such as in his engraving “Hyacinths.” Hyacinths was engraved with a copperplate in 1613. Besler himself did not do the copperplate engravings; rather, they were done from his very detailed drawings. From all of his drawings and next, engravings, came his famous plant atlas "Hortus Eystettensis", which was published in 1613 by Basilius Besler and Ludwig Jungermann. This botanical atlas contains 1086 illustrations of plants from 367 copperplate engravings, most of which were illustrated in their natural size. (Besler,2014)
We know Salvador Dali to be the very eccentric surrealist painter of such paintings as, The Temptation of St. Anthony or The Persistence of Memory. Dali’s painting, Hasty Plum, is quite unlike anything that Dali had painted in the past. Hasty Plum was part of a group of commissioned pieces that were based on 19th century botanical drawings. It was done in the medium of watercolor and gouache in 1969. Recently, because of the rarity or the watercolor paintings, they were sold for 1 million dollars. (Livius, 2014) The theme that connects these two works of art and spans the centur...

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...ortus Eystettensis" was the most modern plant book of its time. A botanist, C. Plumier honored Besler posthumously by naming a climbing bush after him, Beseleria. A well-kept copy of "Hortus Eystettensis" is held at Chicago Botanic Gardens Lenhardt Library. (Besler, 2014) Although the lithographs of Salvador Dali’s fruit paintings were popular among collectors, what happened to the originals? Jean Schneider, the person who commissioned the pieces in 1969, stashed them in a bank vault, and there they stayed for decades. They were displayed in an art gallery in Colonge in 2000-2001, but other than that, they have never been seen. The fourteen watercolors were sold at Bonhams’ Impressionist and Modern Art sale in London on June 18th 2013 not in a whole lot of 14 but as individuals. The total price paid for all of them combined was 1,200,000.00 dollars. (Livius, 2014)