Clemenz Heinrich Wehdemann (1762 - 1835)

BOTANICALS

These drawings are a selection from the unpublished original sketch book by Clemenz Heinrich Wehdemann, dated March 1820, Cape Town Good Hope. The collection is comprised of 52 original botanical illustrations of plants collected in Cape Town, South Africa in 1817, from which these 30 images has been selected. Clemenz Heinrich Wehdemann was born in 1763 in the Kingdom of Hanover.  Wehdemann’s father was a minister and he home-schooled Clemenz, providing him with a good education. At the age of twenty-one, Wehdemann enlisted in the army of the Dutch East India Company and was quickly sent to Cape Town where he rose to the rank of Sergeant. However, Wehdemann’s military career was cut short when the British invaded Cape Town in 1795, around ten years after his enlistment. He joined the Batavian Republic’s army in 1802, but within four years, the British invasion left him without a job. Following the British takeover, Wehdemann attempted to make a living by giving drawing lessons and selling his paintings of the trees found in the Knysna and Alexandria Forests. By 1820, he had started a xylotheque: a herbarium consisting of a series of boxes which include a handwritten description of a tree, a painting of the tree and, finally, a cane tub with seeds from the tree. Wehdemann’s xylotheque is now located at the Mary Gunn Library within the National Herbarium in Pretoria. His paintings did not bring in much income, and he was still very poor when he went to live with his friend G.L.E. Krebs, a naturalist sent to Cape Town to help expand the director of the Berlin Zoological Museum’s personal botanical collection. Because of Wehdemann’s poverty, it can be surmised that Krebs assisted his artistic work by providing him with supplies. Wehdemann died in 1839 at the age of seventy-three on Krebs’s farm. His only possessions were a violin, a mattress, a chair and a table, as he had sold his xylotheque eight years earlier. Wehdemann’s paintings captured the unbridled beauty of Cape Town’s forests in the 18th and 19th centuries. Included in the sketchbook is a letter dated 22 March 1820 from J. May (?), informing Prof. William Dandridge Peck that plants were being shipped to Boston, Mass. There is also a handwritten "List of seeds and bulbs" collected by Wehdemann. Numbered drawings correspond to this list, all written in his own hand..