drawing

This drawing of a lesser periwinkle is almost certainly a page from a manuscript herbal. We know that it was once part of a bound volume because three of the four edges of this sheet have been gilded. There are six companion pages in the V&A collection. The textile designer James Mitten once owned this drawing. He probably used it as source material when designing floral and foliage patterns.

Herbals were concerned with how plants could be used medicinally rather than how they could be identified and the illustrations were secondary to the authoritative text. Here, the lesser periwinkle is shown without its flowers, because its medicinal use came from the leaves. The drawing is accurate and shows how botanical illustrators were moving from using existing images as sources to studying directly from nature.