On pomological collections and their trace in the Loire Valley

By José Pardo-Tomás, Institución Milá y Fontanals-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas

In the summer of 2013, books, furniture and various objects that had belonged to the cabinet of curiosities that the Salvador family kept in the backroom of their pharmacy in the centre of Barcelona for six generations, from 1626 to 1855, were rescued from the Castell de La Bleda (Alt Penedès, Barcelona). One of the most pleasant surprises of that rescue was the discovery that a notable part of the half thousand fruit models that had formed part of the Pomona española project of José Salvador y Soler (1804-1855) had survived the incuriosity of time (fig. 1). The rescued materials from 2013 were added to the bulk of the Salvador cabinet rescued in 1938 by the Catalan Republican authorities. With them came documents, letters and manuscripts that enabled Xavier Ulled to investigate in depth the personality and work of the last of the Salvador family. A prosperous agricultural entrepreneur, particularly concerned with agronomic innovations in the fields of fruticulture and forestry, José Salvador expanded the naturalistic collections inherited from his ancestors and reoriented them, creating a xylotheque and conceiving the great project of the Pomona española. To carry it out, Salvador commissioned these fruit models, negotiated the sponsorship of the Crown at the Madrid court and launched a subscription to finance the publication of the engravings and texts to accompany the models. The Pomona española would begin by reproducing copies of each and every one of the fruits grown in the kingdom of Spain. But the project did not end there; Salvador exhibited these models in his establishment and offered to teach the agricultural owners of Catalonia the new techniques and advances in fruticulture science.

Fig. 1. Fruit models from the Salvador collection rescued in 2013 and restored by Olga Muñoz for the exhibition Salvadoriana. The cabinet of curiosities of Barcelona (Museu de Ciències Naturals i Institut Botànic de Barcelona, 2014-2016). Photo: Natalia Hervás.

Among the testimonies provided by Ulled, several spoke of the inspirational role played in Salvador’s project by the contact established with Louis Claude Noisette (1772-1849), the French gardener and agronomist. Salvador acquired a copy of the second edition of Le Jardin fruitier histoire et culture des arbres fruitiers (Paris, Audot libraire éditeur, 1833-1839) these volumes are now kept in the Salvador library at the Institut Botànic de Barcelona.

Antoine Noisset (1778-1858), Louis-Claude’s brother, was commissioned in 1822 to design the Jardin des Plantes in Nantes, which he then directed until 1835. Do the fruit models still present at the Nantes Jardin des Plantes come from him or his descendants? We owe it to the kindness of Aurélien Bour, the Jardin’s scientific director, that we were able to consult the complete list of the pieces. There are more than two hundred moulages (most of them of different varieties of pears) which the institution’s database dates between 1850 and 1950, although they may well date from the beginning of this imprecise period. Between 1822 and 1870, several establishments were set up in ‘provincial’ France to teach agronomy; horticulture and fruticulture were part of the theoretical and practical teaching plans of the schools opened in several towns. It seems clear that the acquisition of fruit models – first in wax and plaster, then in papier mâché – was a common practice in these schools. Although historiography has insisted mainly on the great Parisian manufacturers, such as Auzoux, the fact is that – before and after Auzoux, who did not start making botanical pieces until 1872 – there were also opportunities for local mouleurs, such as the nantois Moyon.

It is to Moyon that we owe most of the 60 fruit moulages that are preserved today in the very modern storage rooms of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle on the outskirts of Nantes, which we were able to handle and photograph freely, thanks to the kindness of Eric Guiho, in charge of the museum’s botanical collections (fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Fruit models from the collection of the Muséum d’histoire naturelle de Nantes. Photos by the author.

In this case, it is possible to know with a little more precision the provenance of the pieces and the context in which they were produced and used. From what can be deduced from the labels and the documentation kept by the museum, these fruit models are much later than those of the Barcelona cabinet and even those of the botanical garden in Nantes. They came to the museum in 1982 from the Nantes École de Commerce, although they were actually made in 1902-1905. They were commissioned for the short-lived Musée Colonial which was set up for the practical teaching of agriculture in the Colonial Section of the School, on the initiative of the industrialist and banker Hyppolite Durand-Gasselin (1839-1939). The theoretical teaching planned for those who studied in the Colonial Section took place at the headquarters of the École, in the old Nantes mint (Hôtel des Monnaies), while the practical teaching, which required vegetable gardens and greenhouse cultivation, was located at the Château du Grand-Blotterau, a few kilometres outside the city, on loan from Durand-Gasselin. This is where the fruit models commissioned from Noyon and the Parisian manufacturer Theveny were made for. Its didactic role was short: in 1909, the Colonial Section closed and the materials were sent to the headquarters of the École de Commerce, in rue Voltaire, wall to wall with the Muséum.

With regard to the pomological collection that today is kept in the natural history museum of the city of Orléans (now known as MOBE: Muséum d’Orléans pour la biodiversité et l’environnement), thanks to the mediation of Philippe Guillet, we contacted Vladimir Jecmenica, head of the botanical collections, who gave us full access to the pieces kept in the storage rooms, as well as providing us with the – otherwise scarce – documentation that the museum has on this collection. Among the documents, we found a report dated 1985, the result of a visit by Madame Evelyn Leterme, an expert in pomology at the Conservatoire Variétal d’Aquitaine, to examine the fruit models. Her diagnosis praised the state of conservation of 86 of the 124 pieces, as well as their quality in terms of their hyper-realistic capacity to reflect even the smallest lenticule, the pubescence of the sepals and the stains due to disease (fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Some specimens from the pomological collection now kept at the MOBE (photos by the author)

However, Leterme left unanswered fundamental questions, such as what materials (apart from plaster, which was obvious) were involved in the manufacture of such perfect models. As for the provenance, she simply stated that the six boxes in which they were found came from the Muséum of La Rochelle and were addressed, dated 1949, to the former curator of the Muséum of Orléans, Paul Sougy. It is therefore in La Rochelle that the research should be pursued. The existence of a formal teaching of agronomy in the Charente-Maritime region from the mid-19th century is a promising clue.

Bibliographical references

Samantha Bazan et al. HerbEnLoire. Catalogue des herbiers recensés en Pays de la Loire, Angers, Université d’Angers, Conservatoire Botanique National de Brest – antenne Pays de la Loire, 2018.

Bernard van den Driesseche, Le jardin des plâtres: un autre regard sur les collections de moulages, en: Rune Frederiksen & Eckart Marchand, eds. Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2010: 635-650.

Déborah Dubald, Capital nature: a history of French municipal museums of natural history, 1795-1870, Florence: European University Institute PhD theses, 2019.

Noël Guillet, Reine Guillet, Le Grand Blottereau: son château, son écrin de verdure, Nantes, Association Doulon-histoire, 2014.

Marta Pérez, Olga Muñoz, Eulàlia Garcia-Franquesa, Conservación-restauración de modelos botánicos de frutas del Gabinete Salvador, Ge-conservación, 9, 2016: 83-95.

Xavier Ulled Bertran, Pomonas y anatomías en la Barcelona liberal, entre la educación, el comercio y la ciencia, en: José Pardo-Tomás, Alfons Zarzoso, Mauricio Sánchez, eds. Cuerpos mostrados. Regímenes de exhibición de lo humano. Barcelona y Madrid, siglos XVII-XX, México, Siglo XXI-UNAM, 2019: 55-75.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Nathalie Richard (January 17, 2023). On pomological collections and their trace in the Loire Valley. SciCoMove — Scientific Collections on the Move. Retrieved March 20, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/twtt


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