The Roses: The Complete Plates (Taschen 25th Anniversary)
The Roses: The Complete Plates (Taschen 25th Anniversary)
TASCHEN’s 25th anniversary – Special edition! The refined and revered tradition of botanical illustration, produced under aristocratic patronage, stretches back to the Renaissance. It emerged out of the desire to catalogue nature in all its wild splendour, and it was a process that demanded the most precise and skilful of artists. French flower painter Pierre-Joseph Redout? is often viewed as one of the last and the best of these painters and engravers. Commissioned by among others, Napoleon’s J
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STUNNING!,
THIS BOOK IS STUNNING!! WHEN I RECEIVED THE FIRST BOOK I IMMEDIATELY ORDERED A 2ND ONE. THE PICTURES ARE BEAUTIFUL FOR FRAMING. I LOVE REDOUTE’S WORK. THE ATTENTION TO DETAIL IS EXQUISITE. I WOULD RECOMMEND THIS BOOK TO EVERYONE WHO LOVES ROSES, ESPECIALLY BOTANICAL PRINTS. I FRAMED SOME OF THE PRINTS AND THEY LOOK REALLY EXPENSIVE. ALL WHO SEE THEM THINK I SPENT A FORTUNE.
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|Redoute’s Masterpiece,
This book is absolutely beautiful! It includes history and botanical prints of roses. Redoute is a master and his prints are classics. I actually bought 2 books (by mistake) but decided to keep them both. I’ll frame some of the prints(the pages are good quality and suitable for framing)and keep the other book intact to enjoy on the coffee table. The prints are large and I plan to frame them 11×16 inches.
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|Worth the (very modest) investment,
This is a wonderful book and worth the price by all means. Redouté is usually considered one of the best botanical artists of history, along with the Bauer brothers working out of England, but I would tend to rate Redouté higher. Several people have said that he sacrificed botanical accuracy for mass appeal (including the author of this edition’s introduction), but I disagree again. These prints are highly realistic and sensual, but all of the scientific details are there. There are no floral dissections, but I don’t think that is always necessary. Modern floras frequently lack them. An important point: the medium of botanical art is generally watercolor, but these are reproductions of hand-engraved prints after watercolor originals. The original edition off of which these plates are based is largely in excellent condition, so the reproductions look like new.
Redouté and his collaborators were also highly inventive: these prints use stippling (dotted shading), a rather rare technique at the time. Rather than apply dots by hand, the engravers used a toothed wheel, allowing for microscopic accuracy rather than the rather course effect achieved by modern artists who use stippling. The shading is very subtle and closely resembles watercolor. Over this a colorist would add watercolors by hand to give body to what would otherwise be a pale two-color or three-color drawing.
The roses are beautiful and very diverse, including several Oriental roses (a novelty at the time) and 3 plates of proliferating roses (flowers which sprout stems and further flowers of their own). Additionally, the introductory material includes several ultra-violet photographs demonstrating where the stippled engraving technique ends and the watercolor additions begin – such is the integration of the work that it takes careful study to see this! Finally, a word of note about the subjects… the hybrid tea rose essentially did not exist yet, so roses looked quite different in those days. You will find quite a few novel roses here you might not have expected, along with plenty of old-fashioned cabbage roses and moss roses.
This book is definitely worth your while, and I would also recommend TASCHEN’s “Garden of Eden,” which included a couple of plates from this book along with hundreds of other publications and manuscripts. Now if only Taschen would publish Redouté’s “Liliacées,” I would die happy.
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