Bibliophilic Essay #7: Redoutéana
Pierre Joseph Redouté (1759–1840) — the “Raphael of flowers” — revolutionized and dominated the field of botanical illustration. Born in Saint-Hubert in the Luxembourg province of Belgium (then part of the Austrian Netherlands), Redouté followed his brother Antoine Ferdinand, a theatrical scenery painter, to Paris in 1782. There under the tutelage of L’Héritier de Brutelle and particularly of Gerard van Spaendonck, Redouté developed into perhaps the greatest of natural history artists. A trip to London led to his learning from Bartolozzi the method of print-making that he would perfect: stipple-engraving and coloring the plate in ink à la poupée (“poupée” is French for rag-doll; modern practitioners use a cotton swab!), producing a polychrome image that could be finished by hand. His plates — Arader has also handled the original watercolors of the Liliacées from the collection of Empress Josephine as well as other works — are the botanical gold-standard, as scientifically rich (often with Linnaean diagrams) as they are decorative.
Although he would go on to publish books under his own name — the Liliacées, Roses, Choix etc. — Redouté got his start contributing illustrations for others, including his mentor L’Héritier de Brutelle, and would go on to illustrate books by Candolle, Ventenat, Bonpland, Michaux, Tussac and a great many others.
The Hunt Botanical Library (now the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation) mounted an exhibition of Redouté’s books and paintings in 1963, and the catalogue, Redoutéana, remains the essential checklist of his output. Arader holds 13 of the 24 books that were in the Hunt collection, as well as a further 5 listed that they had not managed to acquire. With great pride in that achievement — to say nothing of the three large-paper issues (not mentioned in Redoutéana; one in its original parts and never bound), the presentation copy from Josephine to Sir Humphry Davy and the set of Roses with a full suite of proof plates — below is a selection of books illustrated by Redouté, organized, in homage, by MacPhail's numbering in Redoutéana. For the full list, please continue here.
1. Charles-Louis L'Héritier de Brutelle (no commoner, he) was an amateur horticulturalist who took Redouté under his wing and gave him his first book job: illustrating the Stirpes novæ, aut minus cognitæ (New plants, or less-known) in the traditional mode, viz. pure (linear) engraving, using only the thickness and density of lines to indicate light and dark. Redouté's skill with the burin, and his ability to coax plants into three dimensions, is already apparent. Ex-coll. the Holden Arboretum.
10. Redouté, having worked for L'Héritier de Brutelle (above), Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (succulents) and Etienne Marcel (a re-issue of Duhamel's Traité des arbres et arbustes), finally issued a book under his own name: Les Liliacées (a "wastebasket taxon" of the members of the liliaceae family, rather than just lilies as we think of them; botanists get very hot-under-the-collar about this; Redouté includes irises and orchids and all sorts). It is one of many books that claim the title of his magnum opus: nearly 500 stipple-engraved plates, printed polychrome and hand-colored to finish. Arader has two sets: one in dazzling red straight-grained morocco gilt and another, soberer externally, with the plates bound not in Redouté's suggested order nor in order of issue, but alphabetically according to Linnaeus' binomials!
Presented by the Empress Joséphine to Sir Humphry Davy
13. Redouté was a great ingratiator, and gained the confidence and patronage of Marie Antoinette before the Revolution and of Joséphine (and others) after, no mean feat. He illustrated Aimé Bonpland's Description des plantes rares cultivées a Malmaison -- Bonpland was also a protégé of the Empress's, and superintended her gardens at Malmaison -- which featured some truly exotic and never-before-described plants. Our example bears a description from Lady Davy, widow of the British celebrity scientist Sir Humphry Davy, who accompanied her husband to receive the "Prix de galvanisme" from Napoleon. It explains that Empress Joséphine toured Davy around Malmaison and presented this volume as a token of her esteem.
The Roses with a full suite of proof plates
19. Here we see Redouté in full flower (sorry, I needed one pun): his magisterial Les Roses takes as its subject the rare Malmaison cultivars of that most beloved of flowers. Its appeal is perpetual (including a reduced second edition; our example is bound in rose morocco), and has long been a bibliographic prize. Our set is special as it is a distinct large-paper issue, and has a double set of plates: the fully-realized polychrome stipple-engravings and the monochrome proofs. The Hunt catalogue of Printmaking In The Service Of Botany (1986) explains the choice of ochre paper for the monochrome prints: “the black impressions are always printed on paper with a strong ochre-yellow tint… black impressions on reflective white paper would have produced prints with grossly exaggerated tonal contrasts” (no. 25, p. 64).
Redouté's "greatest hits" album: the Choix
21. By the 1820's Redouté had established himself as the great master, with a fleet of pupils. Napoleon had fallen, Joséphine was dead, Marie-Louise was in Italy, and yet Redouté persevered and found favor under Louis XVIII, with a train of aristocratic admirers. The Choix des plus belles fleurs (Selection of the most beautiful flowers) allowed the mature artist to choose the most successful of his illustrations and to issue them at a stupendous price: 864 francs for this folio issue (a laborer in northern France made some 678fr. annually in 1830). Our set -- from the collection of Henry Rogers Broughton, Lord Fairhaven -- survives in its original part-wrappers, never bound.
Redouté's Caribbean plants -- passing the baton
34. The Hunt held 24 volumes, and so the numbers above that -- mostly later editions or compilations -- are particularly desirable. Tussac's 1808-[1828] Flore des Antilles -- the first great flora of the Caribbean, incidentally -- got to press circuitously (Tussac's own drawings were destroyed in the course of the 1802 Haitian revolution), and principally employed two pupils of Redouté's, Pierre-Antoine Poiteau and Pierre Jean François Turpin, as well as including 10 plates from the master himself. Redouté was so celebrated because he was a prolific teacher as well as a great artist. Although he would continue to paint and to contribute book illustrations late into his life -- we have his final published plate, a rather breathtaking ear of corn in Bonafous's Histoire naturelle, agricole et économique du maïs -- the Flore shows him at the pinnacle of his influence and powers.