Tibouchina martialis (Cham.) Cogn.

This herbarium sheet from the Natural History Museum, London, preserves a dried specimen of Tibouchina martialis, a Neotropical shrub in the Melastomataceae family, collected in 1842 from New Granada — present-day Colombia. The mount carries manuscript annotations, a color-calibration chart, and institutional stamps including one bearing the name F.C. Lehmann, a notable 19th-century plant collector active in the northern Andes. Such pressed specimens were the documentary backbone of Linnean taxonomy, circulating between European herbaria as physical evidence for published species descriptions. The tradition of precise, annotated scientific illustration shares with print satire — Hogarth's labeled moral scenes, Daumier's captioned lithographs — a conviction that careful notation anchors meaning to image, making the annotated sheet a cousin to the captioned plate.