Henry Bradbury Nature-Printed Fern Botanical Prints, Set of Four, Framed

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Henry Bradbury Nature-Printed Fern Botanical Prints, Set of Four, Framed
English, London, 1855–1856

This set of four botanical prints comprises … Read more Henry Bradbury Nature-Printed Fern Botanical Prints, Set of Four, Framed
English, London, 1855–1856

This set of four botanical prints comprises nature-printed plates from Thomas Moore’s The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland, edited by John Lindley and published in London by Bradbury & Evans, a work long regarded as among the finest achievements of nature printing. Rather than being drawn and engraved by hand, each fern was impressed directly into the printing surface, so that every frond, pinna and vein is recorded at life size with a fidelity no draftsman could match. Each sheet is lettered “Nature Printing” at lower left, with the plate number at upper right and the imprint “Printed by Bradbury & Evans, Whitefriars, London” beneath the title.

The set comprises Plate XXVIII, Lastrea Oreopteris, the mountain buckler fern, also known as the lemon-scented fern; Plate XXX, Athyrium Filix-fœmina, the lady fern; Plate XXXI*, three varieties of the lady fern lettered A, B and C, A. Filix-fœmina rhæticum, latifolium and marinum; and Plate XXXII, A. Filix-fœmina ovatum, shown as a full frond flanked by two smaller fronds. Three of the four are devoted to the lady fern, among the most variable of British ferns and a particular favorite of Victorian collectors, whose finely divided fronds show the process at its most delicate.

In the process, as Wilfrid Blunt describes it, the dried plant was passed under pressure between a steel plate and a plate of soft lead, leaving a precise impression in the lead from which a durable copper printing plate was made by electrotype. The plates were then printed in colors, the fronds in green and the stems and scaly stalk bases in brown. The four prints are matted and framed alike in bronzed gilt frames.

Framed uniformly, the four are suited to hanging together, in a single row above a sofa, bed or console, or as a block of four on a larger wall, and they may also be divided into pairs to flank a doorway or chimneypiece. Their restrained palette of green and brown sits comfortably in a library, study, garden room or hallway, in traditional and contemporary interiors alike.

Dimensions
Frame height: 30¼ inches (76.8 cm)
Frame width: 22¾ inches (57.8 cm)
Frame depth: 1½ inches (3.8 cm)
Sheet height: 21½ inches (54.6 cm)
Sheet width: 14¼ inches (36.2 cm)

Provenance
Virginia Collection
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition
Good.

References
Thomas Moore, The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland, edited by John Lindley, nature-printed by Henry Bradbury (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1855–1856), 51 plates.
Wilfrid Blunt and William T. Stearn, The Art of Botanical Illustration.
Roderick Cave and Geoffrey Wakeman, Typographia Naturalis (1967), no. 25; Geoffrey Wakeman, “Henry Bradbury’s Nature Printed Works,” The Library.
Cf. Nissen, BBI 1400; Stafleu and Cowan, TL-2 6275; Pritzel 6405; De Belder 237; Fischer 89; Hofer Bequest 74n.
An impression of the Athyrium Filix-fœmina plate is in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnich Collection, accession number P.18,669.

Historical Context
Nature printing was perfected at the Imperial Printing Office in Vienna, whose director Alois Auer patented the process with Andreas Worring in October 1852. Henry Bradbury (1831–1860), eldest son of William Bradbury of Bradbury & Evans, studied there, patented an improved version in London, and produced the fifty-one plates of The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland, issued in seventeen monthly parts between June 1855 and September 1856 and described in Lindley’s preface as “the first English attempt at applying Nature-Printing to Botanical Science.” The text was by Thomas Moore (1821–1887), curator of the Society of Apothecaries’ garden at Chelsea, the Chelsea Physic Garden, from 1848, and the editor, John Lindley (1799–1865), was the first Professor of Botany at the University of London. Bradbury went on to nature-print an octavo edition of the ferns and a four-volume work on British seaweeds, and planned further books on fungi and trees, but died in 1860 at the age of twenty-nine.

The book appeared at the height of what Charles Kingsley in 1855 called “pteridomania,” the Victorian fern craze that sent collectors into woods and hedgerows, filled parlors with Wardian cases and conservatories, and carried the fern frond onto pottery, furniture, cast iron, textiles and even gravestones. Ferns, with their flat, intricately divided fronds, were among the few plants the nature-printing process could render successfully, and these plates remain its most celebrated result.

(Ref: NY11274-lrrrx) See less