Rose Prints

For Les Roses, Pierre-Joseph Redouté created images devoted to the Empress Josephine's favorite flower. These plates described almost all of the important roses known to botany. Included are many of the key ancestors of our present-day flowers. The plates of Les Roses constitute an important work of both botanical art and natural history, documenting the species and cultivars still surviving, as well as those that have disappeared. more

ROSA GALLICA AURELIANENSIS
$12.00 + S&H

ROSA SULFUREA
$10.00 + S&H

ROSA MUSCOSA ALBA
$12.00 + S&H

ROSA MUSCOSA MULTIPLEX
$35.00 + S&H

ROSA EGLANTERIA
$8.00 + S&H

ROSA PUMILA
$8.00 + S&H

Printed on quality stock that has been designed to look antique. Each print has enough area any desired matting size. Stock has the unique quality of looking pressed by antique methods making for a very original and authentic representation of Redouté's work.

Pierre-Joseph Redouté is unquestionably the most widely known of all flower painters. His celebrity has spread through almost two thousand different engravings of his original watercolors. He was born in the Belgian Ardennes in 1759, but achieved his fame when he perfected the stipple engraving style and became the drawing master of the French empresses and queens. In 1827, after completing his two masterpieces Les Liliacées and Les Roses, Redouté created an anthology of his work. Intended as a personal selection of his finest botanical illustrations, Choix des Plus Belles Fleurs also stands as a testament to Redouté’s brilliant artistic talent.

The flowers depicted in Choix des Plus Belles Fleurs - among them roses, irises, amaryllises, auriculas and marigolds - were grown in the Malmaison gardens of the Empress Josephine in Reuill. Her patronage and support mark the most successful phase in Redouté’s career. She was an enthusiastic collector of rare plants and engaged Redouté as an "artist-in-residence" at Malmaison. It was there that he made the original drawings for Les Liliacées and Les Roses.

The success of Redouté’s engravings depends to a large extent on his technique. Redouté used a method called stipple engraving; unlike line engraving, stipple involves the careful and exacting engraving of minute dots on the copper plate, their density varied to convey subtle differences in tone and shading. Redouté also used line engraving to indicate veining, contours and highlights.

The engraved plate was then "painted" with the necessary colors, and the ink adhered to each of the dots. Afterwards, details and nuances were added by hand watercolor pigments. After printing, each plate would be thoroughly cleaned and the process repeated for another copy. It should be emphasized that, unlike our modern color printing techniques, what Redouté was attempting to achieve was not a more efficient and less expensive form of illustration; his color-printed plates resulted from probably the most complex reproduction methods possible. Rather, he was aiming to create illustrations with the qualities of luminosity, sheen and dimensionality, which were so strongly evident in his original watercolor paintings on vellum.

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