Robert Wight & the Botanical Drawings of Rungiah & Govindoo

Consisting of 3 limpback volumes in a slipcase: volume I – The Life and Work of Robert Wight; volume II – Botanical Drawings by Rungiah and Govindoo: The wight Colection; volume III – Journeys in search of Robert Wight. This trilogy is the second in a series documenting the more important collections of Indian botanical drawings in the library of the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. The drawings were commissioned by Robert Wight, a Scottish botanist and surgeon who travelled extensively in India during the early 19th century. He made an enormous contribution to our botanical knowledge of this area; the Edinburgh herbarium alone contains over 23,000 of his specimens. The central volume reproduces over 200 drawings from the collection, only 8 of which have been previously published in colour. Together the books provide a commentary to the drawings, describing Robert Wight’s life and times, the background to the commission and what is known of the artists involved. The author, himself a botanist, may be familiar to readers from a previous acclaimed work: The Dapuri Drawings