Roses by Pierre Joseph Redoute (9781891788284)

Description - Roses by Pierre Joseph Redoute

Pierre-Joseph Redoute is perhaps the most popular botanical painter of all, thanks largely to the 170 plates collected in the three volumes of Les Roses (1817-24). Redoute (1759-1840) came from a family of many generations of painters, and studied under the botanist Charles-Louis L'Heritier de Brutelle, who persuaded him that the best botanical illustrations were the result of an expert knowledge of living things. For the last fifty years of his life Redoute served as drawing master to the queens and princesses of France, from Marie-Antoinette to Marie-Amelie. His drawings adorned a series of lavishly illustrated books by leading French botanists which covered a wide range of subjects from garden plants to forest trees and succulents. Roses, however, are the most familiar subject of his works, owing to the outstanding quality of his artistry and the devotion of so many gardeners to this group of shrubs. Among these enthusiasts was the Empress Josephine, whose garden at Malmaison contained over 200 varieties of roses, many of which Redoute painted for his book.
Still grown today is a rose with fragrant, pinkish-white flowers called "Souvenir de la Malmaison," which commemorates both Josephine's garden and the West Indian island of Martinique where she was born. Not all the roses depicted in Les Roses came from Malmaison, however; Redoute and the author of the descriptive text, Claude-Antoine Thory, selected varieties from the national gardens at Paris, Sevres, and Versailles and from the gardens of nurserymen and knowledgeable amateurs. Redoute created the most memorable survey of the rose through his skill in representing the its infinite variety and his equal talent for capturing the subtleties of shape and color in both flowers and leaves - and often an impression of the way the whole bush grows as well. Les Roses remains a cornerstone in the study of the historical development of this favorite flower, as well as the unequaled peak of its artistic depiction. No flower painter has so linked his name and immortality with a single genus as has Redoute with the rose.
This Octavo Edition reproduces the first of only five special copies issued in large folio format with the plates in a double sequence: uncolored (on tan paper) and colored (on white paper), from The Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection at the Library of Congress.

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