Exceedingly Scarce! 1806 Hand-Colored Copperplate Engraving, Plate No.926 from:

William Curtis's
The Botanical Magazine
or
Flower-Garden Displayed
No. 926  PAEONIA TENUIFOLIA
FINE-LEAVED PEONY
(Steppe Peony or the Fern Leaf Peony)

This engraving to me is an absolute masterpiece.  Who in their right mind would attempt draw the entire intersecting, filligreed foliage of this insane peony?

An then find me someone who will sit & engrave every overlapping filiament of this plant's leaves, let alone the insane deep red of its petals in bloom, with shading, & document every glorious yellow anther in their dozens, each with it's curves & angles?

Now, having done all that, go find me a watercolorist, with the kind of surgical, impossible precision to color in with the finest brush, all this detail, & not ruin the entire plate with some drip?

It's entirely impossible. And yet, here it is. & a pristine example.

This rare, beautiful print of plate 926 from the Curtis Botanical Magazine is a tour-de-force of this short era of botanical copperplate engravings, it's one of the best ever, in my opinion.

It has become exceedingly scarce. The best plates of the early volumes are now so very rare. This one is an iconic beauty.
 
It's rare to find any of these in this clean condition. Aside from some typical age-toning & a bit antique character to the paper, it's nearly pristine for a centurires-old print.
 
The plate is a classic, engraved in superb detail, the hand-coloring both bold & delicate & exquisitely done.

This one is likely a First Edition print, which are generally very rare. Appears to be on the original handmade wove paper, which had just come into use around the time this plate was issued.

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:
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.

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.

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 in near excellent shape, about as clean as these go, the gorgeous wove cotton handmade paper has very little 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 letterpress, hand typeset page of text.

About this Gorgeous Flowering Plant:

    • Paeonia tenuifolia is a herbaceous species of peony that is called the steppe peony or the fern leaf peony. It is native to the Caucasus Mountains, with large fields found in Vashlivani National Park in Georgia and the Black Sea coast of Ukraine, spreading westward into Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia and eastward to northwestern Kazakhstan. It was described by Linnaeus in 1759.
    • The leaves are finely divided into almost thread-like segments and grow close together on the stems. This peony can reach 30–60 cm (12–24 in) in height. The scented red flowers have numerous yellow stamens in the centre.
    • Paeonia tenuifolia was first described by Linnaeus in the 10th edition of his Systema naturae of 1759. 

    Size:
    9 x 5-1/2" inches approximately.

    Combined Shipping:
    Yes! Multiple prints combine into one package. Ebay's shopping cart should auto-combine shipping if you put all your selections in your cart & chack-out at once. If you purchase multiple prints & are assessed more than one shipping, or if the cart check-out doesn't auto-combine, I'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!