It was acquired by the Conservatory and Botanical Garden of the city of Geneva – where the famous philosopher and writer was born – at a price of €160,000 (£135,300) or €208,000 (£176,000) including buyer’s premium.
Rousseau’s interest in plants had first been aroused in 1763 or 1764 by his enforced exile among the natural beauty of his native Switzerland.
The publication of Emile, his treatise on education in which he asserted that all religions are equally worthy, had led to warrants for his arrest.
Instead, taking refuge in the village of Môtiers in the Neuchâtel canton, he enjoyed the ‘sentiment de la nature’ and began to devote himself passionately to botany. While in England from 1766-67, he was able to develop his knowledge with experienced amateur botanists, notably the Duchess of Portland.
The herbarium created by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1771-73, €160,000 (£135,300) at Ader.
The receipt of a collection of pressed plant specimens (herbarium) from Joseph Dombey, a young naturalist from Montpellier, in 1768, particularly delighted him and by 1771 he was following the fashion of the time and producing his own. The eighth of his Lettres sur la botanique for Mme Delessert was devoted to herbariums.
Around 10 of Rousseau’s herbariums made between 1771-73 have been identified (plus a few isolated plates), most of them in French institutional collections. An example created in 1773-74 for Madeleine Delessert (167 specimens) was acquired by the Musée Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Montmorency at Tajan in October 2001, selling for Fr2.3m (around £250,000).
Another in six boxes, given to Rousseau by the botanist Jean-Baptiste Fusée-Aublet, was sold by Sotheby’s in London in November 1979 where it was acquired by the Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Neuchâtel.
This Ader example titled Echantillons de plantes sèches (Samples of dried plants) features 100 numbered and titled entries plus a 10-page autograph catalogue in which Rousseau gives both the Latin and the French name of each specimen. Occasionally he adds some commentary. In the case of the Rosa Eglanteria (sweet briar rose) he says: “This wild rose is not the gratecu whose leaves are smooth on both sides and odourless, whereas those of this rose have a ruby underside and are fragrant. The English make much of it and put it in their gardens.”
Bound as a portfolio in two card covers wrapped in striped cotton cloth and housed in a later burr elm box, an inscription suggests the herbarium was a gift to the bookseller Charles-Joseph Panckoucke (1736-98), who published some of Rousseau’s writing.
In June 1781, Panckoucke gave it to his brother-in-law Louis-Pierre Couret de Villeneuve (1749-1806), a botanist and director of the botanical garden in Ghent. It came for sale in Paris as part of the collection of Brigitte and Roland Broca with the estimate set at €130,000- 150,000. The auction was conducted by Ader with the assistance of books and manuscripts specialist Thierry Bodin.
