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Roses: Mini Archive with DVD – Essential Botanical Art and Design: Complete Engravings by Redoute and Sowerby with Scientific Index

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Roses offers the complete collection of artists Pierre Joseph Redoute and James Sowerby's magnificent engravings of roses—plus a DVD containing a complete library of images in one unique, affordable package. Part of Collins Design’s Mini Archive series, Roses is the first book to pair Sowerby, one of the fathers of English botany, with Redoute, the Belgian-born artist known as the “Raphael of Flowers” in the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Dynamic and informative, with a comprehensive index allowing Sowerby and Redoute’s beautiful images to enter modern science’s botanical taxonomy, Roses is an essential collection for students, teachers, lovers of botany, and anyone stirred by the beauty of roses.

288 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2011

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About the author

Pierre-Joseph Redouté

78 books5 followers
The tradition of botanical illustration, produced under aristocratic patronage, stretches back to the Renaissance. Pierre-Joseph Redoute is often viewed as one of the last and best of these illustrators.

Redouté (10 July 1759 – 19 June 1840), was a painter and botanist from Belgium, known for his watercolours of roses, lilies and other flowers at Malmaison, many of which were published as large, colour stipple engravings. He was nicknamed "the Raphael of flowers" and has been called the greatest botanical illustrator of all time.

Redouté was an official court artist of Marie Antoinette, and continued painting through the French Revolution and Reign of Terror. He survived the turbulent political upheaval to gain international recognition for his precise renderings of plants, which remain as fresh in the early 21st century as when first painted. He combined great artistic skills with a pleasing, ingratiating personality which assisted him with his influential patrons. After Queen Marie-Antoinette, his patrons included both of Napoleon's wives -- Empress Joséphine and Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma—as well as Maria Amalia of Naples and Sicily wife of Louis Philippe I, the last king of France.

Redouté collaborated with the greatest botanists of his day and participated in nearly fifty publications depicting both the familiar flowers of the French court and plants from places as distant as Japan, America, South Africa, and Australia. He worked from live plants rather than herbarium specimens, which contributed to his fresh, subtle renderings. He was painting during a period in botanical illustration (1798 – 1837) that is noted for the publication of outstanding folio editions with coloured plates. Redouté produced over 2,100 published plates depicting over 1,800 different species, many never rendered before. Of the French botanical illustrators employed in the French capital, Redouté is the one which remains in the public consciousness today. He is seen as an important heir to the tradition of the Flemish and Dutch flower painters Brueghel, Ruysch, van Huysum, and de Heem.

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