FROM ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOKS ABOUT ROSES EVER PUBLISHED

“Rosa centifolia Burgundiaca – La Cent-feuilles de Bordeaux“, stipple engraving, partly printed in colour and finished by hand. Made by Langlois after the design by Pierre Joseph Redoute for “Les Roses“, printed by Imprimerie Rémond in Paris between 1817-1824. Size (plate): 27 x 21,5 cm (paper: c. 48 x 32,4 cm).

Pierre Joseph Redoute (1759 – 1840) was perhaps one of the greatest of all flower artists and was employed by the Empress Josephine, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte as her botanical artist at her estate of Malmaison outside Paris. “Les Roses” is his most celebrated and perhaps the most reproduced of all flower books. In it Redouté figured almost all the important roses of his day in the French Empire. Included were many of the key ancestors of our present-day roses. The plates in Les Roses have artistic value, botanical and documentary value, both for the species and cultivars still surviving and for those that have disappeared. The plates are magnificently and delicately worked, the subtle colouring of the famous French colour printing, which was applied by a rag-stump and re-inked before every impression was an invention of Redoute’s so he claimed. In fact he was awarded a medal for it by Louis XVIII.

Price: Euro 1.250,-