This is one of the many botanical illustrations by Ehret in the V&A collections. The Bull Bay (Magnolia grandiflora) was introduced to Europe from the southern United States. It flowered in Europe for the first time in the garden of Sir Charles Wager at Parson’s Green, near Fulham, a suburb of London. Ehret walked there every day from his home in Chelsea to draw the plant. He studied each stage of its unfolding and ‘drew every part of it in order to publish a perfect botanical study of it’.

The finished watercolour gives a very clear view of the structure of the flower. At the time this was thought to be the key to the classification of plants. The watercolour, though, is as much decorative as scientific. Ehret has not included detailed dissections of the separate parts of the flower and fruit.

Although Ehret worked closely with the great Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, he always favoured the pictorial rather than the diagrammatic style of botanical illustration. Here he has painted the seeds with shadows as if they were actually lying on the page. But the flower itself is represented according to the standard conventions of botanical illustration - that is, in silhouette against a white ground.