Jane Wells Loudon Botanical Lithograph, Sloe, Wild Cherry and Bird Cherry, British Wild Flowers Circa 1846

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Description

Jane Wells Loudon Botanical Lithograph, Sloe, Wild Cherry and Bird Cherry, British Wild Flowers
Circa 1846

This hand-colored lithograph, Plate … Read more Jane Wells Loudon Botanical Lithograph, Sloe, Wild Cherry and Bird Cherry, British Wild Flowers
Circa 1846

This hand-colored lithograph, Plate 31 from Mrs. Jane Loudon’s British Wild Flowers, depicts three native flowering members of the genus Prunus, numbered and identified along the lower margin as the sloe or blackthorn, the wild cherry, and the bird cherry. The composition gathers their flowering and fruiting branches into a single graceful arrangement of white five-petaled blossom, dark sloes and cherries, and serrated green foliage, with small numbered floral dissections set among the stems in the manner of the botanical plate. The drawing is printed in lithographic outline and finished by hand in fresh watercolor, the sheet marked “Pl. 31” at the upper right and lettered with the common names below. It is presented in a giltwood frame with an elaborate wash-line mount.

Framed and glazed, the plate is well suited to a library, study, breakfast room or country-house dining room, and hangs equally well alone or grouped with other botanical plates from the series.

Dimensions
Height: 19¾ inches (50.2 cm)
Width: 16¾ inches (42.5 cm)
Depth: ¾ inch (1.9 cm)

Provenance
Private New Jersey Collection.
Gladstone & Elwyn-Jones, Old Stable Yard, Hawarden Castle, Clwyd (printed label to reverse).
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge.

Condition
Slight foxing; otherwise in good condition, the hand-coloring fresh and the impression clear. The work is presented framed and glazed.

References
Wellcome Collection, London, 24636i (another impression of this plate, cataloged as after Henry Noel Humphreys).
Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 28 (1891), “Humphreys, Henry Noel,” listing his illustrations for Loudon’s British Wild Flowers.

Historical Context
Jane Wells Loudon (née Webb; 1807–1858) was among the most successful popularizers of botany and gardening in early Victorian England. She began as a writer — her futuristic novel The Mummy! appeared anonymously in 1827 — and after her marriage in 1830 to the landscape gardener and horticultural writer John Claudius Loudon she turned to botanical authorship, in part to relieve the family’s debts. Her accessible illustrated books, beginning with The Ladies’ Flower-Garden of Ornamental Annuals (1840), brought horticulture and the natural system of plant classification to a wide popular audience, particularly women.

British Wild Flowers, first published in 1846, extended her work to the native flora, with sixty full-page hand-colored lithographed plates arranging the plants by family. The plates are recorded as drawn by the illustrator and naturalist Henry Noel Humphreys (1810–1879), lithographed by Day & Haghe, lithographers to Queen Victoria, and finished by hand. The present plate brings together three flowering members of the stone-fruit group of the rose family — the sloe (Prunus spinosa), wild cherry (Prunus avium), and bird cherry (Prunus padus) — uniting botanical accuracy with the decorative grouping that made Loudon’s flower books so admired.

(Ref: NY11195-mrxx) See less