The Volumes:
Sydenham Edwards's famously gorgeous plates were first published in Dickson's A Complete Dictionary of Practical Gardening in 1807, and then republished by Stockdale in 1812 both under the present title and as The New Flora Britannica. See Cleveland Collections 718; Dunthorne 107; Great Flower Books (1990) p. 93; Nissen BBI 480. Disbound original prints from this work have become rare, this one is among my faves for its detail, composition & fascinating rendering of every element of these intricate plants. I find no others of this engraving offered anywhere.
The Artist:
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 near excellent condition for a centuries-old engraving. The wove cotton handmade paper has very little age-toning, typical minor artifacts from its life as a bookplate, tiny artifact from handling at the extreme right edge, archivally reinforced in back, possibly some faint text-offsetting, a remarkably clean print for a plate this old.
These prints are very old & may have imperfections expected with age, such as age-toning of the paper, spots, text-offsetting, artifacts from having been bound into a book, etc. Please examine the photos & details carefully.
Text Page(s):
This one comes without its original page of text. A scan of a title-page from one of the volumes is included for reference, it's not part of the listing.
Size:
9-1/2 x 11-1/2" 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!