Rosa Gallica (flore giganteo.)

For 'Les Roses'.

Pierre Joseph Redoute (1759 - 1840) was perhaps one of the greatest of all flower artists and was employed by the Empress Josephine, wife of the Emperor Napoleon as her botanical artist at her estate of Malmaison outside Paris. This work 'Les Roses' is his most celebrated and perhaps the most reproduced of all flower books. In it he figured almost all the important roses of his day (Empire France). Included were many of the key ancestors of our present-day roses. The plates in Les Roses have artistic value, botanical and documentary value, both for the species and cultivars still surviving and for those that have disappeared... The plates here are magnificently and delicately worked, the subtle colouring of the famous French colour printing, which was applied by a rag-stump and re-inked before every impression was an invention of Redoute's so he claimed. In fact he was awarded medal for it by Louis XVIII.