Christoph Jakob Trew

Trew was born on 26 April 1695 in Lauf an der Pegnitz, near Nuremberg, the son of a town apothecary who was himself a capable botanist and who trained his young son in botany, herbal medicine, and pharmacy alongside a general humanist schooling. Some general reference sources give his birth date as 16 April 1695 rather than 26 April; the more specialized German biographical and institutional sources favor 26 April. Trew matriculated in medicine at the University of Altdorf in 1711, a period of study repeatedly delayed by financial difficulties, and he earned his doctorate on a dissertation concerning chyle in the fetus, supervised by the surgeon Lorenz Heister. Sources disagree on the exact year of the degree, giving either 1716 or 1717.

From 1717 to about 1720, Trew undertook an extended study tour through leading European centers of medicine and science, including Würzburg, Strasbourg, Basel, Geneva, a thirteen-month stay in Paris, and a year in Leiden, with further stops in Hamburg, Danzig, and Königsberg before returning through Leipzig, Halle, Jena, and Erfurt. He settled in Nuremberg around 1720 to 1721, where he practiced as a municipal physician and cultivated the city's Theatrum anatomicum and Hortus medicus, organizing instruction there for surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, and natural history artists. In 1761 he became senior primarius of the city's Collegium medicum.

Alongside his medical career, Trew assembled a large library and network of scientific correspondents and used both to commission and publish monumental illustrated botanical works, most notably Plantae selectae (issued in parts from 1750 to 1773) and Hortus nitidissimis omnem per annum superbiens floribus. He died in Nuremberg on 18 July 1769 and was buried at the Johannisfriedhof. His library, correspondence, and the original drawings for Plantae selectae passed, via the University of Altdorf, to the University Library of Erlangen-Nürnberg in 1809, where they remain today.

Trew's standing rests less on modern art criticism than on the consensus of biographical and scientific institutions that place him at the center of Enlightenment botanical illustration and correspondence. The Leopoldina, the Royal Society, the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and the Societas Botanica Florentina all admitted him during his lifetime, and modern reference works such as the Deutsche Biographie treat him as a major organizer of eighteenth-century natural history knowledge in Nuremberg.

Trew's auction market is that of the rare botanical book and print trade rather than the conventional fine-art market, and it is thin. The only realized price the available sources confirm is EUR 39,360, paid for a copy of Plantae selectae at Ketterer Kunst in Munich, as reported in the house's coverage of its auction 472; the exact sale date is not confirmed in the available sources. Separate Sotheby's listings of Plantae selectae in 2015 and 2022 carried presale estimates of roughly GBP 20,000 to 35,000, but neither lot's public catalogue page discloses a realized price, so those figures cannot be directly compared to the Ketterer Kunst result.

Collectors should understand Trew primarily as a figure in the antiquarian book and natural history print market, not as a hand illustrator himself; the paintings behind his folios were made by Georg Dionysius Ehret and engraved by Johann Jakob Haid and collaborators, under Trew's direction and financing. There is no catalogue raisonne of his output, and verification of a given volume or plate depends on bibliographic collation and comparison against institutional holdings, chiefly at the University Library of Erlangen-Nürnberg. With only a single confirmed sale price and two unconfirmed presale estimate ranges for the same title, the price history is too thin to support any confident trend line, and completeness, coloring, and edition matter more to value than any single benchmark figure.