Redouté, Pierre-Joseph and Claude Antoine Thory

Les Roses. Paris: De l'Imprimerie de Firmin Didot, 1817



3 volumes, folio (21 1/2 x 14 in.; 546 x 354 mm). Half-titles, uncolored engraved portrait or Redouté by C. S. Pradier after François Gérard, stippled engraved floral wreath and 169 plates after Redouté by Bessa, Bessin, Chapuy, Langlois, Lemaire, Victor, and others, printed in colors and finished by hand; scatttered foxing, plate of Rosa muscosa and Rosa muscosa multiplex (vol. 1) stained in lower fore-edge, foxing more pronounced on half title and first plate (Rosa Gallica latifolia) in vol. 3. Half purple morocco over marbled boards, spine elaborately stamped in blind and lettered gilt, marbled endpapers, top edges gilt, by Simier (his ticket in vol. 1); some wear to extremities.

Longleat House (sale, Sotheby's London, 1 February 1984, lot 45)

Dunthorne 232; Great Flower Books, p. 71; Hunt Redoutéana 19; Hunt Printmaking in the Service of Botany 25; Johnston Cleveland Herbal 807; Nissen BBI 1599; Pritzel 7455; Ray French 89; Stafleu & Cowan TL2 9748

First edition, large paper issue, bound from the original thirty parts produced between March 1817 and March 1824. Les Roses was issued in four formats: a large-paper folio with colored plates (as here); a special large-paper issue with the extra suite of the plates printed in black ink on ochre paper; a small folio with colored plates, and a small folio with the plates in two states. "The technical execution of its production was ... near perfect. The artistic quality of the plates is high, and there is no reason to mark it any lower than one would Les Liliacées [see lot 24] and the Jardin de la Malmaison" (Stafleu). The plates of Les Roses were executed by means of stipple engraving, a method ideally suited to render the subtle gradations of tone found in Redouté's original watercolors. Redouté had met the renowned and talented engraver Francesco Bartolozzi from whom he learned that the most successful of stipple engravings came from well-used plates. Redouté's printers struck black impressions—always on paper with a distinct ochre tint—from both the plates for Les Roses and Les Liliacées before printing in colors commenced.  

Like Les Liliacées, Redouté's Roses bear testament to the influence of his patron Joséphine Bonaparte, even though she did not live to see the book published. Redouté started painting roses at Malmaison, and, as Stafleu notes, "in many respects the plates are Joséphine's roses." The botanical descriptions were by Claude Antoine Thory, a civil servant by profession, and an enthusiastic gardener who cultivated his own collection of roses.  He and Redouté regularly traded cuttings. The roses depicted in the work included examples not only from Malmaison, but from Thory's garden as well. "Redouté and Thory knew, described, and figured almost all the important roses in their day. Included were many of the key ancestors of our present-day roses.  The plates in 'Les Roses' have artistic value, and botanical and documentary value, both for the species and cultivars still surviving and for those that have disappeared" [Gisèle de la Roche, quoted in the Schutter facsimile (Antwerp, 1974–1978)].