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Ferdinand Lucas Bauer (20 January 176017 March 1826) was an Austrian botanical illustrator who travelled on Matthew Flinders' expedition to Australia.
In mid-1786, on the recommendation of Jacquin, Bauer accompanied the Oxford Professor John Sibthorp as an artist on a field trip to Greece and Asia Minor. They returned to England in December 1787 with over 1,500 sketches of plants, animals, birds and landscapes, some of which appeared in Flora Graeca. The Latin introduction to this work states "Sibthorp took with him a painter of excellent reputation, Ferdinand Bauer, whose merits our illustrations demonstrate." Joseph Hooker called Flora Graeca, with its 966 superbly hand-coloured illustrations, "the greatest botanical work that has ever appeared".
Bauer, intent on capturing accurately the tone and shading of his specimens, but unable to carry with him the range of colours needed, covered his preliminary sketches with colour numbers. Banks was intrigued by Bauer's precision, and in January 1806 wrote that they "were prepared in such a manner by reference to a table of colours as to enable him to finish them at his leisure with perfect accuracy". A 2017 book contains reproductions of collections in Europe, the United Kingdom and Australia that have never before been published and reveals Bauer's innovative colour-coding technique for the first time.
In June 1803, while Flinders returned to England in order to obtain a replacement for , Bauer remained in Australia. He went to Norfolk Island for eight months and also undertook excursions to Newcastle, the Blue Mountains and the south coast of New South Wales. Bauer returned to England on Investigator, accompanied by 11 cases of drawings containing 1,542 Australian plants, 180 Norfolk Island plants, and over 300 animals.
From 1806 to 1813, 50 sets of Bauer's Illustrationes were published in three parts. Unfortunately, the publishing venture was a failure, and in August 1814 Bauer returned to Vienna, but continued to do much work for English publications including Lambert's Pinus and Lindley's Digitalis. He acquired a small house in Hietzing near the Schönbrunn Botanical Garden and spent his time painting and making excursions into the Austrian Alps until shortly before his death from dropsy on 17 March 1826.
The bulk of Bauer's finished paintings was acquired by the British Admiralty. In 1843 they were transferred to the British Museum together with additional paintings that Robert Brown had bought from Franz Bauer. Most of the sketches, as well as the herbarium and a collection of skins, were acquired by the Austrian Imperial Museum and are now housed in the Natural History Museum in Vienna.
Whereas Bauer's brother, Franz, is remembered both by a portrait and a memorial in Kew, Ferdinand Bauer himself has no portrait or stone to commemorate him other than a mention in Franz's epitaph in St Anne's Chapel in Kew: "In the delineation of plants he Franz united the accuracy of a profound naturalist with the skill of the accomplished artist, to a degree which has been only equalled by his brother Ferdinand."
Lhotsky did revive Bauer's name, but his brief biography remained the only source of information about the naturalist-painter for the next 100 years. Bauer's gained some prominence in the 1970s with the work of William Stearn and Wilfrid Blunt in their publication The Australian Flower Paintings of Ferdinand Bauer. The 1988 Bicentenary brought original Bauer paintings to Australia for the first time, where they were shown in three exhibitions, including "First Impressions" shown at the Australian Museum. In April 1989 the first monograph about Ferdinand Bauer's Australian voyage appeared, Ferdinand Bauer: the Australian Natural History Drawings. Drawing on both the English and Austrian collections, it also reproduced all of Bauer's known letters in translation. In 1985, 100 uncatalogued animal sketches by Bauer were found in Vienna, and some of them were included in the monograph.
Bauer's sketched the flora and fauna of the Australian coast and Norfolk Island, and left behind a wonderful visual record. In an essay on flower painting written in 1817, Johann Goethe devoted two pages to an analysis of one of Bauer's drawings: "we are enchanted at the sight of these leaves: nature is revealed, art concealed, great in its precision, gentle in its execution, decisive and satisfying in its appearance". His work has lasting important because of his craftsmanship, aesthetic sense and scientific accuracy.
Many of Bauer's watercolours are in the Sherardian Library of Plant Taxonomy at the University of Oxford, which has also digitised his botanical work Flora Graeca.
This botanist is denoted by the author abbreviation F.L.Bauer when citing a botanical name.
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