Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin

Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin was born on 16 February 1727 in Leiden, in the Dutch Republic. He completed his secondary education at a Jesuit gymnasium in Antwerp, then attended the University of Leuven before returning to study medicine and botany at Leiden University. From 1750 to 1752 he continued his medical studies in Paris. In 1752, at the invitation of Gerard van Swieten, physician to the imperial court and director of the Vienna medical faculty, Jacquin moved to Vienna to pursue his scientific career. Sources differ on exactly where and when he completed his medical doctorate: some biographical accounts place the degree at Leiden, while others describe his continued studies in Paris; the exact university and year of the degree are not consistently documented across the sources consulted.

In the years that followed, Jacquin undertook botanical expeditions to the Caribbean and Central America, work that fed his publication Selectarum Stirpium Americanarum Historia (Vienna, 1763). He became professor of mining and chemistry at the mining school in Schemnitz (now Banska Stiavnica), and was later named to the chair of chemistry and botany in the medical faculty of the University of Vienna, taking charge of the imperial garden at Schonbrunn. He was ennobled in 1774, elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1783 and of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1786, and in 1806 was raised to the rank of Baron (Freiherr). He served as Rector of the University of Vienna around 1809 and was made an honorary member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1812.

Jacquin died on 26 October 1817 in Vienna. The University of Vienna Library holds the original death record, which lists him as 91 years old at death and attributes the cause to old age ("Altersschwache"); this date is corroborated by Deutsche Biographie and the Austrian National Library. A small number of secondary sources give 24 October 1817, but the weight of archival and institutional evidence supports 26 October.

Jacquin is treated in scientific and bibliographic literature, not in art criticism, and the record reflects that. Encyclopedia.com's biographical entry describes him as the most important botanist among the younger contemporaries of Linnaeus, and characterizes his illustrated floral publications, which combined his own studies with plates by other artists working from his models, as among the finest of their kind. Linnaeus dedicated the plant genus Jacquinia to him, a mark of standing among his scientific peers. No exhibition history of Jacquin's own illustrations as fine art, in the gallery or museum sense, is documented in the sources consulted.

Jacquin does not have a fine-art auction market in the way a painter or sculptor would. His printed botanical works and individual hand-colored plates trade through specialist auction houses and antiquarian and rare-book dealers, and no single, fully documented all-time high (with confirmed work, price, currency, house, and sale date) could be verified for this profile. The most substantial reference point located is a Sotheby's lot from the 2017 sale of the Magnificent Botanical Library of D.F. Allen in New York, which carried a Jacquin work at an estimate of USD 80,000 to 120,000; the realized price is not publicly available. Sotheby's has also listed other Jacquin botanical sets, including Icones Plantarum Rariorum (three volumes, estimate GBP 30,000 to 50,000) and Hortus Botanicus Vindobonensis (three volumes, estimate GBP 20,000 to 30,000), again without a published realized price. Collectors should treat these estimate-level figures as market color rather than a confirmed record.

Anyone approaching Jacquin as a collecting category should understand that this is a rare-book and natural-history print market, not a conventional living- or modern-artist market. There is no gallery or estate representation, no catalogue raisonne, and no unified price index; value depends heavily on edition, completeness of plates, quality of hand coloring, and provenance of the specific copy or print, and it is assessed by rare-book and print specialists rather than by contemporary-art specialists. His works are held across major natural-history museums, herbaria, and university libraries worldwide, which supports long-term reference value and authentication, but collectors should not expect the kind of auction-price trend line associated with a working contemporary artist, and no confirmed all-time record price can currently be cited with full transaction detail.