Pierre-Joseph Redouté ( 1759-1840) is considered to be one of the foremost botanical painters of his time. His career spanned many years, and he was the personal art teacher of Queen Marie-Antoinette as well as the Empresses Josephine and Marie-Louise after the French Revolution. After the monarchy was restored in France, he was the personal art teacher for the Duchesse du Barry and Queen Marie-Amelie. Redouté illustrated approximately 50 botanical books during his lifetime making him one of the most prolific and widely celebrated botanical artists of the 18th and 19th centuries. He was a student of the great botanical artist Van Spaedonck, and under him he mastered the art of stipple engraving, which made his botanical publications the wonder of the age. Stipple engraving is a process in which the image is composed of dots on a copper plate, with the color added to the plate itself. The resulting engraving was then finished by hand with water color, giving the flowers a delicately luminous quality.

Five lovely folio plates from this monumental botanical work; only two hundred copies were published, appearing in eighty fascicles issued from 1802 to 1816. Each plate also gives the title in French to the right of the Latin name. Each bears the imprint of P.J. Redoute as artist and Chapuy as the engraver.

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Condition: B+

Fine impression and original hand coloring. The paper is trimmed to outside the plate mark except on the right side is trimmed a little closer. The first two have extra trim on right that encroaches into Chapuy imprint and on the second also part of the French title.