Pierre Jean Francois Turpin Art

Pierre Jean François Turpin (Born in 1755) has been ranked among the Napoleonic Era’s greatest floral illustrators. Surprisingly, he was relatively unknown and did not even achieve the celebrity status of Pierre Redouté of his equal. Not only was he an exceptional illustrator, he was also a proficient botanist with many momentous scientific accomplishments to his credit. He was the son of an impoverished artisan but managed to study drawing in France. However, his artistic skills were largely self-taught. François Turpin moved to the United States in 1800. This is where he met Humboldt with whom he again forged a strong partnership that proved fruitful later on in his career. The artist again moved to Haiti, to serve as an army pharmacist, not as an artist or botanist as one would have expected. When François Turpin and Humboldt returned to their homeland, they continued collaborating and embarked of refining the collection and preparing the material for publication. The two collaborated on a study of the flora of Haiti, and in the course of their work, they collected a herbarium of more than thousand plants. François Turpin decided to go for more adventure on a foreign land. He traveled alone to Tortuga Island and Hispanola to make further botanical studies. He made drawings of many of these plants in the field to serve as the foundation from which he described about 800 species for further study in France. His art is admired by many viewers to date. That’s why framed Pierre Jean François Turpin art are selling in large numbers. François Turpin died in 1840.