A new treatise on flower painting, or every lady her own drawing master: containing familiar and easy instructions for acquiring A perfect Knowledge of Drawing Flowers with Accuracy and Taste: also complete directions for producing the various tints. By George Brookshaw, Esq. author of the Pomona Britannica
London: J. M‘Creery for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown; J. Booth and J. Lepard, 1818.
Pot folio (11 15/16” x 9 11/16”, 303mm x 245mm): A1 B-K2 [$1 signed]. 19 leaves, pp. [2] (title, blank) 1 2-36. With 24 plates: one engraving and 23 (of 24) stipple-engravings, of which 11 are hand-colored; as well as eight pages of colored swatches instructive of mixing.
Bound in contemporary half green morocco over marbled boards. On the spine, six panels. Title gilt to red morocco in the second panel. All edges of the text-block glazed red.
Quite rubbed and worn, with the hinges starting. Tanned, with passages of foxing and soiling (particularly to the title). Offsetting at the plates. Lacking the colored plate of fuchsia. Ink ownership inscription of “Rachel ?Heely/ 1879” to the recto of the first free end-paper.
George Brookshaw (ca. 1751–1823) began as cabinet-maker specializing in painted furniture in the neoclassical mode, with its characteristic swags of flowers (see, for example, a pier table in the Victoria & Albert). His career as a maker of books began with a New treatise on flower painting (1797; as “George Brown”), which led naturally to his magnum opus: the Pomona britannica, a pomological survey of the fruits raised principally but not exclusively in the royal gardens at Hampton Court. The original work proved popular, and would be joined by similar instructional works on fruit and bird painting.
For the student of painting, or indeed for the collector of color-plate books, the opportunity to see colored and uncolored plates — including some, as is the sweet pea, printed in green stipple in order better to have the ink disappear behind the painting — as well as color swatches with their formulas defined is invaluable. Works such as this are often found incomplete or worse still completed (i.e., ham-handedly filled in), and so the absence of the colored fuchsia plate might be forgiven.
A Rachel Heely was married in 1852 in Seapatrick, Co. Down, Ireland, but the evidence is too weak to put this volume in her hands.
Abbey, Life 96; Dunthorne 52; Henrey III.519; Nissen, BBI 246.
Item #JLR0806
Price: $985