Images of Australian wildlife in 200 shades of green

By Robin Powell
Updated November 23 2017 - 9:43am, first published November 14 2017 - 2:47pm

The Austrian natural history painter Ferdinand Bauer had a prodigious memory for colour. All of us can distinguish bottle from lime, but how many of us could parse 200 different shades of green? Bauer could and he was at the height of his powers when he joined Matthew Flinders' mission to chart the Australian coastline and document its flora and fauna in 1802-3. More than a thousand colours glowed on his mental colour chart. Each was assigned a number and he used this code to mark up the scientific drawings he made of plants and animals in the field. The annotated sketches could then be turned into vividly lifelike watercolours at his leisure.

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