Johann Jakob Walther (artist)



Johann Jakob Walther (23 January 1604 – 1676/7 Strasbourg) was a painter and natural history illustrator, who chronicled the life of Strasbourg during the Thirty Years' War, but is best known for his work Horti Itzeinensis aka the Nassau Florilegium depicting flowering plants from the gardens of Johann, Count of Nassau-Idstein at Idstein.

Walther was the son of Gerard Walther. He probably trained in the workshop of miniaturist Friedrich Brentel. He left Strasbourg around 1618 and returned in 1635. He was elected to the Grand Council of the city in 1659. His meeting in Strasbourg with the Count was a decisive moment in his career, since the Count became one of his most important patrons.

This was an era when the purpose of a florilegium was to serve as a pictorial catalogue of a garden, and correspondence shows that the Count invited Walther to Idstein near Frankfurt to spend the spring and summer months there to paint flowers and fruits from the garden - Walther did so on at least eight occasions between 1654 and 1674. The paintings were bound into anthologies of which only three versions are known - one at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has 133 flower studies and a number of views of the garden that are painted on paper and bound in two volumes, another at the National Library of France, a codex of 54 gouaches on parchment, and the final set at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main which has two volumes of the Florilegium with 130 gouaches of flowers on parchment.

Walther was the great-uncle of the painter François Walter (1755-1830).