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Berthe Hoola van Nooten (12 October 1817 Utrecht - 12 April 1892 Batavia), was a Dutch botanical artist, noted for her botanical plates illustrating "Fleurs, Fruits et Feuillages Choisis de l'Ile de Java" in 1863-64.

Berthe was the daughter of a vicar and married Dirk Hoola van Nooten, who worked as a judge in Paramaribo on 11 July 1838. Being interested in botany, she regularly sent specimens of cultivated plants to the botanical gardens in Holland, collected on trips through Suriname and Java with her husband. Personal tragedy and financial disaster struck with her husband's death in 1847, leaving her stranded in Java with large debts and a young family of five, a situation much like that faced by Maria Sibylla Merian and Elizabeth Blackwell. Aware of the vogue in Europe for lavishly illustrated exotic floras, she set about producing 40 plates depicting interesting plant species from Java.

Her attempts to publish the work were unsuccessful until she acquired the patronage of Sophia Mathilde, wife of King William III of the Netherlands. The exceptionally well-executed chromolithographs were done by Pieter Depannemaeker, the Belgian lithographer operating from Ledeberg in Ghent. "Van Nooten was clearly a more than competent artist, for the splendid tropical plants, with their lush foliage, vividly coloured flowers and exotic fruit, have been depicted with great skill. She managed to accentuate the splendour of each species by adopting a style that combined great precision and clarity with a touch of neo-Baroque exuberance, reveling in the rich forms and colours of the tropics. The reader's eye is immediately captured by the dark leaves, shown furled or crumpled or partly nibbled away by insects, the delicately rendered details of the follicles and seeds, and the heavy clusters of flowers that cascade down the page. The excellent reproduction of the artist's drawings in the form of chromolithographs lends a tactile quality to these striking images." — Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, An Oak Spring Flora.

Despite the book's running to a number of editions, Berthe van Nooten died in straitened circumstances in Batavia when 74 years old. The Hoola van Nooten family name is today respected in the Netherlands, and is listed in the Nederlands Patriciaat, a register of Dutch families who have played a significant role in Dutch society over the past 150 years.

References

• Tomasi, Lucia Tongiorgi (1997). An Oak Spring Flora: Flower Illustration from the Fifteenth Century to the Present Time: A Selection of the Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Works of Art in the Collection of Rachel Lambert Mellon. Upperville, Va.; New Haven, Conn.: Oak Spring Garden Library; distributed by Yale University Press. ISBN 0300071396.

1. VLDesignprints
2. National Library of Australia

External links

• Botanicus

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• Living people
• 1892 deaths
• Dutch botanical artists