Alexander Marshal

Who was Alexander Marshal?

Alexander Marshal was an English entomologist, gardener and botanical artist, noted for the florilegium he compiled, consisting of some 160 folios of plants cultivated in English gardens, and finally presented to George IV in the 1820s.

Marshal belonged to a coterie of gentleman gardeners from London, who cultivated and studied rare plants. These previously unknown species were introduced to England from the Near East and the New World in the 1600s. Marshal worked on his florilegium for some thirty years, and despite his not being a professional artist, his book boasts some of the most pleasing images in botanical art.

Samuel Hartlib, the German polymath, wrote that Marshal had by 1650 produced a florilegium for the botanist and gardener John Tradescant the Younger. Marshal was described as an accomplished painter of flowers and fruit in Sir William Sanderson's Graphice of 1658.

Marshal painted for the pleasure it gave to him and his horticulturist friends. William Freind, Marshal's great nephew and heir, wrote of him as a having "an independent fortune and painting merely for his amusement".