William Roscoe Large Botanical Print of Tropical Plant

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William Roscoe Botanical Tropical Plant Large Print,
Alpinia Magnifica,
Monandrian Plant of the Order Scitamineae,
Published 1828

A spectacularly large … Read more William Roscoe Botanical Tropical Plant Large Print,
Alpinia Magnifica,
Monandrian Plant of the Order Scitamineae,
Published 1828

A spectacularly large and beautifully framed botanical print. The subjects for this publication were chiefly drawn from living specimens in the Botanical Gardens at Liverpool. The print is hand colored and with original text attached verso- see attached photos.

Dimensions: Frame: 30" x 25 1/2", Sight 20 1/2" x 15 3/4".

Provenance: Property from a Bucks County, Pennsylvania Collection
Each with W. Graham Arader III tag verso.

ROSCOE, William (1753-1831). Monandrian Plants of the order Scitamineae, chiefly drawn from living specimens in the botanic garden at Liverpool. Liverpool: George Smith, [1824-] 1828.

Arranged according to the Linnean system, Roscoe's descriptions and observations are accompanied by attractive grand-scale colour plates. The work comprises two sections, Cannae and Scitamineae, and in it Roscoe presents a new arrangement of the plants of the monandrian class.

A Liverpool banker and politician, Roscoe was also a highly-accomplished historian, poet and botanist. A friend of Sir James Edward Smith, he founded the Liverpool Botanical Garden (1802) and was a member of the Linnean Society (elected 1805). His achievements in the study of botany were rewarded by naming an order after him ('Roscoea').

Roscoe, a talented member of a talented family, was a banker from Liverpool and supporter of the liberal arts. This work, his masterpiece, was originally issued in 15 parts. The focus of the work is on a selection that is now considered part of the Zingiberales order of flowering plants. The order, which is almost exclusively tropical in origin, includes the canna liliies, arrowroot, ginger and tumeric. Roscoe provides 1 or 2 pages of text for each specimen, giving the plants binomial, a technical description followed by a fuller more general description, and ending with "observations" (notes on where the plant is from, who has described it previously, and often when the drawing of the plant was made) and "references" (brief explanations of the small numbered dissections found on each plate). The characteristic leaf shapes and flower-sprays provide the numerous artists of the work with some spectacular originals to work from. Helpfully, Roscoe identifies all but one of the artists, with the majority of the images having been provided by Thomas Allport.

The plates are important relatively early lithographs which are attributed by Roscoe to George Graves, but they are almost certainly "actually printed by Hullmandell, though Graves may have placed the commission for Roscoe" (John Collins writing in the Plesch catalogue). Collins earlier notes that although Graves specialised in colouring natural history plates, he is not known as a lithographer.

(NY10549-cmrx) See less