Botanical prints

Two ways of picturing a flower hang side by side here. Redouté shows one stem on white paper, a flower, a bud and the leaves turned to show both sides, with nothing behind it; his roses were engraved in dots, printed in colour from a single plate and finished by hand. Robert John Thornton, a London physician who painted none of his plates himself, did the opposite. His artists, Philip Reinagle, Peter Henderson and Sydenham Edwards among them, set each flower in a landscape that evokes its country, and the plates mix mezzotint, aquatint, stipple and line engraving.

Compare Thornton’s Roses, a bank of roses with a nest and a classical temple behind, with any plate from Redouté’s Les Roses. Or choose The Night Blowing Cereus from The Temple of Flora: a white cactus flower opening in the dark while a church clock shows the hour past midnight. What is Thornton’s The Temple of Flora? tells how the book ruined its maker.