ANTIQUE BOTANICAL PRINTS - FLOWERS
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FLOWERS
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The Botanical Magazine or, Flower Garden Displayed In Which the Most Ornamental Foreign Plants, Cultivated in the Open Ground, the Green-House, and the Stove, are Accurately Represented in their Natural Colours.
To Which are added Their Names, Class, Order, Generic and Specific Characters, According to the Celebrated Linnĉus; their Places of Growth, and Times of Flowering:
Together with the Most Approved Methods of Culture.
Published in London - 1793
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RESOURCE - it is NOT an Inventory.
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Some Background Information About William Curtis and the Prints
This work was and is an ideal companion to the flower gardener, or indeed anyone interested in botanicals. Each print has a comprehensive outline of the class and order, generic character, specific character and synonyms. It outlines the conditions in which to keep the plants in order to get the most out of them, the manner in which the names were deciphered and the origin (where known) of the plant.
Although the prints from this publication are over 200 years old. The Colours are still vibrant, as if they had been printed yesterday. Unfortunately the colours on the scans are not entirely accurate to the print. The vibrancy of some of them is lost in this process. Also the background colour is more yellow than the paper on the prints themselves. This is due to the attempt to recreate the exact colours of the flowers.
The prints are lithographs hand coloured to an extremely high quality.
WILLIAM CURTIS (1746-1799), was trained in pharmaceuticals, articled to his Uncle. At the age of 27, he was appointed, Demonstrator and 'Praefectus Horti' to the Chelsea Society of Apothecaries. His passion, however, was botany, his forte being British flora. His first project was funded by Lord Bute and consisted of illustrations and descriptions of the wild flowers within a 10 mile radius of London. This was called Flora Londinesis and was published in 1777. Having completed this task, he resigned from this post and began a collection consisting of 70 folios. This collection was not very profitable, gardeners were not interested in 'weeds', they wanted to see garden flowers. Because gardeners were more affluent than botanists at the time, he discontinued his work on this publication and began work on the Botanical Magazine which would cater for their tastes.
This periodical: The Botanical Magazine, was extremely popular, its first publication being in 1787. Of the many horticultural and botanical periodicals produced since this, the foremost, there is not one among them that compares to the extensive work of William Curtis, his passion for botany being his motivation. After the death of Curtis, in 1799, the Botanical Magazine was continued by a friend on his, John Sims and was then passed on to William Jackson Hooker. It was continued for almost two centuries until 1984 when it was integrated with the The Kew Magazine.
The principal artists employed for this work (in Curtis' Lifetime) were William Kilburn, James Sowerby and Sydenham T. Edwards. All of which worked with Curtis for 28 years and were responsible for the exquisite quality of the plates contained within the magazine. Later illustrators after Curtis died were W. J. Hooker, Walter Hood Fitch and his nephew, John Nugent Fitch. The Fitches being the sole illustrators for 71 years.
This
REFERENCE page is an index to records of the prints with many
scanned images.
Volumes
1, 2 and 3
Volumes
4, 5 and 6
Volumes
7, 8 and 9
Volumes
10, 11 and 12
Volumes
13, 14 and Miscellaneous
1846 EDITION which includes ORCHIDS
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