João Barbosa Rodrigues

João Barbosa Rodrigues (June 22, 1842 – March 6, 1909) was considered one of Brazil's greatest botanists, known especially for his work on orchids and palms. For nearly two decades he was director of the Botanic Garden of Rio de Janeiro. Something of a polymath, he was a prolific botanical artist who also made contributions to his country's ethnography, geography, linguistics, zoology, and literature.

Rodrigues was born on June 22, 1842, in São Gonçalo do Sapucaí, Brazil, and was initially raised in Campanha, in the state of Minas Gerais, before the family returned to Rio in 1858. His father was a Portuguese merchant, and his mother was a Brazilian of Indian descent. He had several siblings: brothers João Baptista and Arthur and sisters Maria and Olympia. He showed early ability as a writer and he was always interested in natural science, particularly in collecting insects and plants. However, he went to the Central School of Engineering in Rio de Janeiro, where he got a solid classical education. Only after graduating in 1869 did he really begin to pursue his scientific interests.

Rodrigues initially became a teacher of drawing at the Colegio Pedro II who specialized in botany, under the supervision of Francisco Freire Allemão e Cysneiro. He began his botanical expeditions in 1868 and was commissioned by the Brazilian government in 1871 to explore the Amazon basin and study palms, in part due to sponsorship by Guilherme Schüch, Baron of Capanema. This expedition lasted more than three years, during which time which he drew not only plants but also animals and Indian artefacts. By the early 1890s, he had created nearly 900 color plates of Brazilian orchids. Because of difficulty financing a publication with illustrations, Rodrigues published descriptions of more than 540 new orchids and 28 new genera without any images in his important two-volume work Genera et species orchidearum novarum (1877/1881). He then allowed another botanist, Alfred Cogniaux, to publish black-and-white versions of some 260 of his drawings in Cogniaux's Flora Brasiliensis (1893–1906). Nearly one-third of the species included in Flora Brasiliensis were initially described by Rodrigues.

Cogniaux gave the British botanical artist Harriet Anne Hooker Thiselton-Dyer access to the Rodrigues drawings in his possession, and she copied some 550 of them for the Kew Gardens collection before they were returned to Brazil. Unfortunately, the original drawings disappeared sometime after Rodrigues's death and are now lost, making Thiselton-Dyer's copies a uniquely valuable resource on Rodrigues's work.

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