Rosa Damascemna Variegata / Rosier d´ Yorck et de lancastre

Title

Rosa Damascemna Variegata / Rosier d´ Yorck et de lancastre

Description

Beautiful representation of two roses with sprouts

ca. 1830

Artist

Redouté (1759-1840)

Pierre-Joseph Redouté was born on July 10, 1759, in St. Hubert near Liège in the Belgian Ardennes. He came from a family of painters; his grandfather Jean-Jacques Redouté (1687-1752) worked on commission for churches and sacristans, and his father Charles-Joseph Redouté (1715-1776) earned his living as a painter. At barely 15 years old, Pierre-Joseph had outgrown his father's care and, as was customary at the time, set out on a journey. He traveled through Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, taking on various commissions: interior decorations, portraits, and religious themes. He became acquainted with the works of the great Flemish masters, especially Rachel Ruysch and Jan van Huysum. These flower paintings opened up a new world for him.Redoute's fame is largely due to his tireless endeavours to perfect stipple engraving. This labour-intensive and therefore expensive technique produces subtle but impressive colour variations and is superior to engraving alone. Each plate was produced using the ‘a la poupee’ process, where the colour was applied before printing. After printing, the colour was painstakingly applied by hand. Redoute was renowned for his artistic ability and tutored such people as Queen Marie-Antoinette, Empress Josephine, Marie-Louise, and Queen Marie-Amelie. Redoute influenced a breadth of artists that followed him including Turpin, Poiteau, Bessa, and Prevost. Redoute is widely considered the finest botanical illustrator of the early 19th century, if not throughout history. The process of stipple engraving and color printing give the Redoute Rose prints their luminous quality. Stippling is an etching process that employs dots instead of lines to form the image, which is then color printed by applying colored inks directly to the copper plate for each impression. The use of colored inks, greens and browns to print the stems and leaves, and reds and pinks to print the flowers, create a more luminous print by eliminating the necessity to paint watercolor over a back inked image.

Historical Description

Plant science, or botany, deals in detail with the diversity of the plant world and tries to bring it into a system. The plants are examined in terms of structure, growth, life cycle, reproduction, metabolism and chemical properties. Plant science is one of the oldest sciences: people have been studying the effects of certain plants since early on. What was of interest was whether these were edible or of a healing nature. Today, five sub-areas make up botany. Plant morphology studies plant structure and form. This includes the internal and external structure as well as the structure of the plant cell. Plant physiology examines functional processes such as metabolism. Plant systematics brings order to the plant world. It describes precisely the different types of plants. Geobotany deals with the location of the plants. This includes the interaction between the plant and its environment. Ecophysiology explores to what extent and why plants have adapted to their environment in the past. This is particularly interesting because this also happens in environments with hostile conditions.