Scarce 1777 CURTIS FLORA LONDINENSIS Hand-Colored Folio Engraving: POPPY

Description: 1777-1798 Rare Large Folio Hand-Colored Copper-Plate Botanical Engraving From: FLORA LONDINENSIS ORPLATES AND DESCRIPTIONS OF SUCH PLANTS AS GROW IN THEENVIRONS OF LONDON By W I L L I A M C U R T I S Papaver Dubium. Long-Headed Poppy This magnificent, large, Folio engraving originates from William Curtis's Flora Londinensis, published in London between 1777 & 1798. Appears to be on the original wove paper. The beautiful cream-colored, thick handmade wove cotton rag paper is watermarked 'W. Balston 1816' which likely indicates this one could be from the expanded edition, published from 1817-1828 which had all the original plates plus more. The plates I've collected from this edition seem to be generally cleaner, the wove paper thicker than the old chain-lined stock. This print appears very clean & pristine. The composition, drawing & detailed line-engraving are quite stunning. The meticulously detailed, delicate hand water-coloring appears to be as it was the day it was painted. Many of these extremely rare plates from this work are among the best botanical line-engravings I've seen & collected. This particular one is among the most beautiful, most attractive & scarce of the entire series. The Volumes:The Flora Londinensis are famous folio-sized volumes that illustrated & described the flora found in the London region of the mid 18th century.The Flora was published by William Curtis in six large volumes. The descriptions of the plants included hand-coloured copperplate plates by botanical artists such as James Sowerby, Sydenham Edwards and William Kilburn. The full title is Flora Londinensis: or, plates and descriptions of such plants as grow wild in the environs of London: with their places of growth, and times of flowering, their several names according to Linnæus and other authors: with a particular description of each plant in Latin and English. To which are added, their several uses in medicine, agriculture, rural œconomy and other arts.The Subscriber's List in Volume I records 321 names who between them subscribed for 331 complete copies. So this print is one of the only 331 First Edition original examples ever made. The Author:William Curtis (11 January 1746 – 7 July 1799) was an English botanist and entomologist, who was born at Alton, Hampshire, site of the Curtis Museum. Curtis began as an apothecary, before turning his attention to botany and other natural history. He was demonstrator of plants and Praefectus Horti at the Chelsea Physic Garden from 1771 to 1777. He established his own London Botanic Garden at Lambeth in 1779, moving to Brompton in 1789. He published the Flora Londinensis (6 volumes, 1777–1798), a pioneering work. he went on the publish The Botanical Magazine in 1787, a work that would also feature beautiful hand colored octavo-sized plates by artists such as James Sowerby and Sydenham Edwards. The Botanical Magazine was & remains immensely popular. The Artists:Curtis commissioned some of the best botanical artists of the age in London, such as James Sowerby, Sydenham Edwards and William Kilburn. James Sowerby was one a highly esteemed & prolific English naturalist, illustrator and mineralogist. His immense volume of engravings from his own drawings in the various publications he produced & contributed to is astounding. He fathered a dynasty of Sowerbys who created & published important plates & works on Natural History, especially in the realm of Conchology (Seashells). Sydenham Teast (or Teak) Edwards (5 August 1768 – 8 February 1819) was a natural history illustrator. Edwards produced superb plates at a prodigious rate: between 1787 and 1815 he produced over 1,700 watercolors for Curtis's Botanical Magazine alone. He illustrated Cynographia Britannica (1800) (an encyclopaedic compendium of dog breeds in Britain), New Botanic Garden (1805-7), New Flora Britannica (1812), and The Botanical Register (1815-19). He also provided drawings for encyclopedias such as Pantologia and Rees's Cyclopædia. He completed a number of parrot illustrations between 1810 and 1812 which were acquired by Edward Smith-Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby. Edwards was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1804. William Kilburn (1745–1818) was an illustrator for William Curtis' Flora Londinensis, as well as a leading designer and printer of calico. A few hundred originals of his water colour designs make up the Kilburn Album, housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The Prints & Technique:Line-engraving or Copperplate engraving is a highly exacting & labor-intensive process for intaglio printmaking. The original drawing is cut into the surface of a copper plate with a hand-held sharp steel point or burin, with shading created by many fine cut lines, or hatching. Before printing takes place, the plate is heated, covered with ink. The warm ink seeps into the finest of depressions and fills the lines and textures of the drawing. The rest of the plate is cleaned off. The copper plate is now pressed with a printing press on to moistened paper which soaks up the ink from the depressions in the plate. The copperplate-engraving technique is very exacting, time-consuming and exhausting for the engraver, who needs a lot of strength for it. Every part of these prints was made by hand: Hand painted from original plant specimens, drawn & engraved in polished Copper plates which were hand-mined, smelted & rolled, printed onto handmade cotton rag paper, hand cranked through an elaborate handmade etching press, inked & colored with hand-ground pigments individually by hand, & they were usually hand sewn into handmade leather-bound books. Condition:Appears to be in Excellent condition for a centuries-old engraving. The hand water-coloring appears to remain as beautiful & rich as the day it was printed.Appears to be some oxidation to the original brilliant red pigment used for the blossoms (possibly Cinnabar?) as is typical for the scarce series of poppies in the Flora Londinensis. These prints are very old & may have imperfections expected with age, such as age-toning of the paper, spots, oxidation of the old original watercolors, spots, text-offsetting, artifacts from having been bound into a book, etc. Please examine the photos & details carefully. Text Page(s): This one comes with original pages of text. Printed on the huge folio-sized paper handmade paper, beautifully type-set in the old English, with extensive information on this plant. Included in the images is a scan of a title page from one of the volumes. It's for reference & isn't part of the listing. About this Gorgeous Flowering Plant:Papaver dubium is a species of poppy known by the common names long-headed poppy and blindeyes. It is an annual species which prefers sandy soils without lime. It is native to Europe, North Africa and south-western Asia and widespread as an introduction in America and elsewhere.Papaver dubium is a variable annual, growing to about 60 cm in height. It generally flowers in late spring to mid-summer. The flower is large (30–70 mm) and showy, with four petals. The flower stem is usually covered with coarse hairs that are closely appressed to the surface, helping to distinguish it from P. rhoeas in which the hairs are more usually patent, held at right angles to the stem. The capsules are hairless, elongated to more than twice as tall as they are wide, tapering slightly at the tip, with a stigma generally less wide than the capsule. The plant exudes white to yellowish latex when the tissues are broken. The species can form a long-lived soil seed bank that can germinate when the soil is disturbed. Size: 18-1/4 x 11-1/4 inches approximately. Combined Shipping: Yes! Multiple prints can be combine into one Priority Mail flat-rate envelope or package. Larger prints may need to be shipped in tube. eBay should auto-combine your items if you put all of your selections into your shopping cart & check out all together as one order.If you purchase them individually, eBay charges shipping on each, which I then will need to refund after.If you're assessed multiple shipping charges for one combined package, I will endeavor to refund any overage asap. It's pretty complicated with eBay's system to combine multiple purchases after, & then refund individual shipping costs, hope they improve this someday. So if you could please combine in your shopping cart & check out at once... Combined Shipping Internationally through eBay's International Shipping Program, Please Note: At the moment, I've been offering eBay's International Shipping Program. This new shipping program has some advantages since they manage the customs forms, etc. But it apparently has some bugs, It won't allow me to refund shipping overages for individual purchases.So please note: The only way their international shipping program allows combined shipping, is if you put all the items in your cart & check out at once. Otherwise it requires me to ship each item separately in it's own package with its own label.Ebay's International Shipping doesn't allow 'Best Offer' for combined shipping since 'best-offer' requires individual checkout, which then can't be combined in this program (I don't get it either...).So if shipping multiple items in one package is important, the only way it works in eBay's International Shipping Program is if you load them all into your cart, without best-offer, & check out at once. If I accept a best offer for international buyers, the items won't be able to be combined for one shipping cost... Insurance: USPS Priority Mail typically insures a Priority Mail package or envelope for a maximum of $100. If the value of your combined purchase goes over that, I may not always be able to absorb this cost, they do allow me to add the additional insurance cost to cover the additional value. I do pack very carefully. In the extremely rare case that USPS damages anything in transit, the best way to be refunded for your purchase is to actually take your physical package to the Post Office & file a claim. It gets tedious to try to document & file a claim from my end, but I'll do my best to help ~ Thanks for Visiting!

Price: 199 USD

Location: Great Barrington, Massachusetts

End Time: 2025-01-08T17:35:51.000Z

Shipping Cost: 15 USD