A buzzard's nest in Altenburg
Hermann Schlegel was born in 1804 in Altenburg, in Saxony, the son of a brass founder who collected butterflies. The butterflies were his first lesson in natural history, but it was a buzzard's nest, found by chance as a boy, that turned him towards birds. The find also brought him to the ornithologist Christian Ludwig Brehm, who would later open the door to his career.
Schlegel was a German-born zoologist who spent almost sixty years at the natural history museum in Leiden, the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (today Naturalis), first as an assistant and from 1858 as its director. He drew and lithographed his own plates, wrote down the rules a scientific drawing should obey, and left two bird books from which our prints are made: the Traité de fauconnerie on falconry and De Toerako's on the turacos of Africa.
From Vienna to Leiden
He worked for his father first and soon tired of it. At twenty, in 1824, he went to Vienna, where he followed the lectures of the zoologist Leopold Fitzinger and of Johann Jakob Heckel, zoologist and taxidermist. A letter of introduction from Brehm secured him a place at the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, and a year later the director of that museum recommended him to the natural history museum in Leiden.
In Leiden he began as an assistant, at first with the reptiles, and was soon involved with the whole zoological collection. For 33 years he worked under the museum's founding director, Coenraad Jacob Temminck, and when Temminck died in 1858 Schlegel succeeded him. In his early forties he was made a correspondent of the Royal Institute, which later became the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Schlegel's rules for a scientific drawing
Schlegel was a fine draughtsman and put his own drawings on the stone for lithography. In 1849 he wrote down what a 'physical drawing' of an animal had to do. The animal must be shown at the right distance, as if alive and intact; the colours must be true; the lighting must be right; and anything likely to belong to one individual rather than to the species must be left out, because the plate stands for the species.
These were the years of the debate on evolution. Schlegel held that species were fixed and said so, in open opposition to Darwin's theory.
Keulemans, Smit and Wolf
For his bird books Schlegel employed three accomplished artists: John Gerrard Keulemans, Joseph Smit and Joseph Wolf. Wolf drew the hawks of the Traité de fauconnerie, the plates that launched his career; Gould and Elliot in London soon employed him too. For De Toerako's Schlegel drew the turacos himself, from living birds in the Amsterdam zoo wherever he could.
He died in Leiden on 17 January 1884. Several species carry his name, among them the royal penguin, Eudyptes schlegeli.
Schlegel's plates at Heritage Prints
Both books are in the library of the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, and our facsimiles are photographed from those copies, plate by plate, by Re-Art Special Art Productions in Almere. The Traité de fauconnerie series holds 24 prints, 18 after the hand-coloured plates and 6 after plates issued uncoloured; De Toerako's holds all 17 plates. Each print is the size of the original sheet, in an edition of 250, numbered in pencil, blind embossed and with a certificate of authenticity.
See all of them at Hermann Schlegel, or read on: What is the Traité de fauconnerie? and What is De Toerako's?.
Four plates by Schlegel and Wolf
Questions
What is Hermann Schlegel known for?
For directing the natural history museum in Leiden from 1858 to 1884, for his rules on how to draw an animal for science, and for two bird books: the Traité de fauconnerie (1844-1853), with life-size hawks by Joseph Wolf, and De Toerako's (1860), with turacos drawn by Schlegel himself.
Which museum did Schlegel direct?
The Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie in Leiden, now Naturalis. He came there as an assistant in 1825 and succeeded its founder, Coenraad Jacob Temminck, as director in 1858.
Did Schlegel draw his own plates?
Yes. He was a skilled draughtsman and lithographer and drew the 17 turacos of De Toerako's himself. For the Traité de fauconnerie the hawks were drawn mainly by Joseph Wolf.