Rare 1843 L'Horticulteur Universal Folio Hand-Colored Engraving RHODODENDRUM

$ 99.00

Scarce 1889 Hand-Colored Folio Stone Lithograph from:

L'HORTICULTEUR UNIVERSEL,

JOURNAL

DES JARDININIERS ET AMETTEURS

PAR

C. LEMAIRE.

Rhododendron Morelianum

This beautiful, large & extremely rare Rhododendron folio originates from L'Horticulteur universel, journal general des jardiniers et amateurs by Charles Lemaire, Paris, 1839-47.

The Double-sized fold-out plates were reserved for the showiest, most dramatic, largest flowers. They were very rare in the series, & yet much rarer in the market, as they can often make the most impressive framed wall-art in terms of scale & image & are sought-after if & when one can be found.

The Publication:

L'Illustration Horticole, one of the great Belgian horticultural periodicals of the 1800s. Published from 1854 to 1896, L'Illustration Horticole featured a monthly review of noteworthy plants for the greenhouse and garden. Included were descriptions, illustrations, history and advice on cultivating the plants. In 1869 Jean Linden took over publication of the review (Linden is best known for his Iconography of Orchids).

It contained hundreds of hand-colored engraved plates by Lemaire, Dumenil, Oudet, Visto, Legrand and others after Vaillant, Neumann, Maubert and others.

The Artists:

This plate was lithographed & hand-colored after a painting by Louis Joseph Édouard Maubert (30 January 1806 Calais – 30 April 1879 Paris ), who was a prolific French natural history illustrator, & who contributed to botanical books and horticultural journals, working with botanists such as Jean-Louis-Auguste Loiseleur-Deslongchamps, Charles Antoine Lemaire, Charles Henry Dessalines d'Orbigny, Hippolyte François Jaubert and Jean Jules Linden.

Maubert trained under the watercolor painter Louis Francia , and settled in Paris around 1836. He improved his skills with Pierre Joseph Redouté at the Museum of Natural History. His training and talent gained him access to scientific circles within the Museum of Natural History. He painted flowers until the day before his death in his Parisian apartment at 15 rue de Buffon in the 5th arrondissement.

The Author:

Charles Antoine Lemaire (1 November 1800, in Paris – 22 June 1871, in Paris), was a French botanist and botanical author, noted for his publications on Cactaceae.

He worked for some time as an assistant to M. Mathieu, at a nursery in Paris, building up a collection of Cactaceae, a group to which he would devote almost all of his life. In 1835, M. Cousin, a Parisian publisher, started a gardening journal and requested that he be its editor. For a number of years, he remained editor of Jardin Fleuriste and L'Horticulteur Universel, contributing greatly to the content.

Lemaire moved to Ghent as editor of the journal Flore des Serres et des Jardins de l'Europe, started by Louis van Houtte. In 1854 he turned to editing L'Illustration Horticole, also in Ghent and owned by Ambroise Verschaffelt, and stayed there until 1870 when he returned to Paris where he died in June 1871.

The Print:

The drawing & composition are fluid, bold, lyrical, the coloring is subtle & delicate. It's a beautiful plate, full of the passion that the early flower painters, botanists & gardeners had for these amazing flowers, many of which were discovered in the pristine reaches of the ever-expanding British Empire & by intrepid explorers of the time.

Condition:

Appears to be in good to excellent condition. The hand-coloring remains sharp & brilliant. The folds in this one are as-issued, as it's a 'fold-out' & much larger than the rest which were octavo-sized bookplates, thus the print could be folded in to fit the size of the volume it was bound in.

These prints are very old & may have minor imperfections expected with age, such as some typical age-toning of the paper, 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 without its original text pages.

About this Gorgeous Flower:

'Rhododendron × morelianum' is a synonym for Rhododendron catawbiense Michx.× Rhododendron ponticum L.
It's apparently hybrid of Rhododendron catawbiense Michx. × Rhododendron ponticum L.
Rhododendron catawbiense, with common names Catawba rosebay, Catawba rhododendron, mountain rosebay, purple ivy,[3] purple laurel,[3] purple rhododendron, red laurel, rosebay, rosebay laurel, is a species of Rhododendron native to the eastern United States, growing mainly in the southern Appalachian Mountains from West Virginia south to northern Alabama.
Rhododendron ponticum, called common rhododendron or pontic rhododendron, is a species of flowering plant in the Rhododendron genus of the heath family Ericaceae. It is native to the Iberian Peninsula in southwest Europe and the Caucasus region in northern West Asia.

Size: 10-1/2" x 14" inches approximately.