Exceedingly Scarce 1790 Hand-Colored Copperplate Engraving from:
 
William Curtis's
The Botanical Magazine
or
Flower-Garden Displayed
 
No. 57 EASTERN POPPY
PAPAVER ORIENTALE
 
This is among the best of all the early Curtis Botanical engravings. Perhaps the most stunning & sought-after, & now beyond scarce. So here's one of my very best botanical prints.

It apparently can't be found anymore, there's not a single original of this stunning plate I can find  anywhere. 

And it's rare to find any of these in such exquisite condition, it's nearly pristine, as if nobody much looked through this book, & it was preserved flat, almost as beautiful as the day it was printed & colored.
It's also just plain rare, for good reason, it's magnificent.
 
The plate is singularly stunning. The scarce printings of this plate I've ever seen were always arresting, completely different than the other major, important early plates, which were the best of this incredible, epic effort.

The Poppy is one of the showiest, most brilliantly-colored of all flowers. Always breathtaking when the poppies pop up in spring. William Curtis's earlier efforts to create engravings of this stunning flowering plant were in the folio-sized Flora Londinensis, which were all beautifully drawn, yet the mineral used for approximating this transluscent, brilliant red tended to oxidize with dark areas.

Some of the minerals used for intense colored pigments back then would be beautiful at first, but did not age well, being minerals, some would oxidize & change over time (e.g. Van Gogh's Sunflowers, brilliantly yellow, but became browner with age).
 
It seems that by the time Curtis produced this plate, which was only No. 57 of this early volume, his water-colourists had begun to use different pigments which maintained color-fastness. I'm not sure which exotic mineral they ground up into this spectacular color to try to capture the brilliance of this poppy, perhaps cinnabar(?). It is glorious.  

This plate is one of the classics of the Curtis volumes. This one is likely a First Edition print, which are generally very rare. Appears to be on the original chain-lined, laid paper which would indicate a 1st edition print.

The Volumes:
The "Botanical Magazine" was first published in 1787 by William Curtis (1746-1799). After the death of William Curtis, the magazine was published by his brother, Thomas Curtis. Later, Samuel Curtis (a son-in-law of William Curtis) became proprietor from 1801 to 1845. The prints in the first volumes were copper plates colored by hand. Some of the later prints were lithographs.

Some of the distinguished artists were Sydenham Edwards, John Curtis, William Jackson Hooker, W.H. Fitch, William Graves and Matilda Smith. These prints have a universal beauty and are a lasting documentary contribution to botanical studies.

The Author:
William Curtis (11 January 1746 – 7 July 1799) was an English botanist and entomologist, who was born at Alton, Hampshire, site of the Curtis Museum. Curtis began as an apothecary, before turning his attention to botany and other natural history. He was demonstrator of plants and Praefectus Horti at the Chelsea Physic Garden from 1771 to 1777. He established his own London Botanic Garden at Lambeth in 1779, moving to Brompton in 1789. He published the Flora Londinensis (6 volumes, 1777–1798), a pioneering work. he went on the publish The Botanical Magazine in 1787, a work that would also feature beautiful hand colored octavo-sized plates by artists such as James Sowerby and Sydenham Edwards. The Botanical Magazine was & remains immensely popular.

The Artists:
Curtis commissioned some of the best botanical artists of the age in London, such as James Sowerby, Sydenham Edwards and William Kilburn.

James Sowerby was one a highly esteemed & prolific English naturalist, illustrator and mineralogist. His immense volume of engravings from his own drawings in the various publications he produced & contributed to is astounding. He fathered a dynasty of Sowerbys who created & published important plates & works on Natural History, especially in the realm of Conchology (Seashells).

Sydenham Teast (or Teak) Edwards (5 August 1768 – 8 February 1819) was a natural history illustrator. Edwards produced superb plates at a prodigious rate: between 1787 and 1815 he produced over 1,700 watercolors for Curtis's Botanical Magazine alone. He illustrated Cynographia Britannica (1800) (an encyclopaedic compendium of dog breeds in Britain), New Botanic Garden (1805-7), New Flora Britannica (1812), and The Botanical Register (1815-19). He also provided drawings for encyclopedias such as Pantologia and Rees's Cyclopædia. He completed a number of parrot illustrations between 1810 and 1812 which were acquired by Edward Smith-Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby. Edwards was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1804.

William Kilburn (1745–1818) was an illustrator for William Curtis' Flora Londinensis, as well as a leading designer and printer of calico. A few hundred originals of his water colour designs make up the Kilburn Album, housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The Prints & Technique:
Line-engraving or Copperplate engraving is a highly exacting & labor-intensive process for intaglio printmaking.

The original drawing is cut into the surface of a copper plate with a hand-held sharp steel point or burin, with shading created by many fine cut lines, or hatching. Before printing takes place, the plate is heated, covered with ink. The warm ink seeps into the finest of depressions and fills the lines and textures of the drawing. The rest of the plate is cleaned off. The copper plate is now pressed with a printing press on to moistened paper which soaks up the ink from the depressions in the plate. The copperplate-engraving technique is very exacting, time-consuming and exhausting for the engraver, who needs a lot of strength for it.
 
Every part of these prints was made by hand: Hand painted from original plant specimens, drawn & engraved in polished Copper plates which were hand-mined, smelted & rolled, printed onto handmade cotton rag paper, hand cranked through an elaborate handmade etching press, inked & colored with hand-ground pigments individually by hand, & they were usually hand sewn into handmade leather-bound books.

Appears to be in Excellent condition for a centuries-old engraving. The hand water-coloring appears to remain as beautiful & rich as the day it was printed. Appears to be a smudged drip at lower-right, which looks to be an authentic artifact of the hand-coloring, the watercolorists, no matter how perfect they are, would sometimes color a bit outside the lines...

These prints are very old & may have imperfections expected with age, such as age-toning of the paper, spots, oxidation of the old original watercolors, spots, text-offsetting, artifacts from having been bound into a book, etc. Please examine the photos & details carefully.

Condition:
Appears to be in Superb condition for a centuries-old engraving. The hand water-coloring appears to remain as beautiful & rich as the day it was printed. The paper is beautiful, pristine as it gets, hand-laid Chain-lined gorgeous cotton with apparently little if any age-toning.

These prints are very old & may have imperfections expected with age, such as age-toning of the paper, spots, oxidation of the old original watercolors, spots, text-offsetting, artifacts from having been bound into a book, etc. Please examine the photos & details carefully.

The Plate:
The drawing & coloring are quite stunning. 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.

These gorgeously drawn, engraved & water-colored original prints were presented on their page with consistently balanced, beautiful compositions.

Text Page(s):
This one comes with its original text-page, letterpress, typeset page of text.

About this Gorgeous Flowering Plant:

    • Papaver orientale, the Oriental poppy, is a perennial flowering plant native to the Caucasus, northeastern Turkey, and northern Iran. 
    • The scientific name Papaver orientale was established in 1753 by Linnaeus.[5] The species is classified in the genus Papaver within the wider family Papaveraceae. It has no varieties that are accepted, but does have four among its thirteen synonyms.

    Size:
    9-1/4 x 11" inches approximately.

    Combined Shipping:
    Yes! Multiple prints combine into one package. If you'd like to combine & need more time to choose, please send a message & we'll do our best to oblige. If you're assessed multiple shipping for one combined package, we'll endeavor to refund any overage asap.

    Thanks for Visiting!

    Please note: The information I've included in this listing is based on my best research as an enthusiast of these works, not a professional historian of antiquarian books & prints. I like to research & offer some background information about these works which is readily available to me, but I make no claims of total accuracy. Any corrections or further information you might offer would certainly appreciated! The scans in the images are my best efforts to accurately show the item. Antique prints & old paper are notoriously tricky to scan accurately. In my experience, scanners tend to be thrown off by the off-whites & gradations in age-toned paper. If the scanner produces a scan that's too dark or the colors are off, etc, I'll often try to reasonably color-correct to represent the print more as accurately as I'm reasonably able, although I'm not a professional in color-correcting images. I also find that different monitors show colors differently, & eBay's system can sometimes throw off the colors a bit in the uploaded jpeg images as they appear on their site. Thank you!