Study of a winding Adder
  • Franz Anton von Scheidel
  • Vienna 1731 - 1801
  • Study of a winding Adder, ca. 1780
  • Watercolour and gouache over pencil, on laid paper, partly with red edges, watermark: crowned lilly / ...& Z
  • 361 × 506 mm

Although Franz Anton Scheidel’s oeuvre spans over more than a thousand drawings, watercolours, and engravings, very little information has been handed down over the years about the personality of this masterly nature painter. He apparently specialized from an early stage in zoologically and botanically correct representations of individual animals and plants, which are meant to give the viewer as realistic of an image as possible through the use of shadows and realistic colouration.

As a result, many natural scientists and botanists around Scheidel also sought, throughout his life, to illustrate their typically multi-volume encyclopedias with this artist’s detailed plates. Thus, when Nikolaus J. von Jacquin (1727-1817), the director of the gardens at Schönbrunn Castle in Vienna, published his comprehensive work Hortus Botanicus Vindobonensis (The Botanical Gardens of Vienna) in 1770-76 and the five-volume Flora austriaca in 1773-78, he included several hundred richly-coloured engravings by Franz Anton von Scheidel.

No less famous, even today, are his splendid shell illustrations for Friedrich H. W. Martini’s (1729-1778) Neues systematisches Konchylien-Cabinett (New, Systematic Conchylia Cabinet).