WILLIAM SHARP AND JOHN FISK ALLEN, A set of four 19th Century American chromolithograph plates

removed from Victoria Regia; or the Great Water Lily of America. Matted and within giltwood frames, not examined out of frames.

The present chromolithographs are a nineteenth-century botanical masterpiece of striking beauty and "among the most successful examples of early chromolithography" (Reese). William Sharp, who emigrated to Boston from England, was America's first substantial chromolithographer. "In the large water lily plates of Victoria Regia, Sharp printed colors with a delicacy of execution and technical brilliance never before achieved in the United States" (Reese). The Victoria regia was discovered on the Amazon in the 1830s and was first brought to bloom in England by the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth in 1849. John Fiske Allen's lily, which he grew in Salem, Massachusetts and which is the basis for these plates, was given to him by Caleb Cope, president of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and the dedicatee of this work. The text and plates are based on an earlier English work by Walter Fitch (1851).