Plate 22 - Narcissus Aureus

Artist: John Traherne Moggridge (1842-1874)

Date: 1864

Publication: Contributions to the Flora of Mentone, Part I

Style: Original Hand-Coloured Lithograph

Paper Size: Approximately 10 x 6 inches (25.4 x 15.2 cm)

Condition: This plate has a closed tear, clearly visible in the photograph, and has therefore been reduced to £30. It may also show the natural foxing or light age-toning associated with historic paper. Foxing is the familiar brown spotting that can develop through age, oxidation and past environmental conditions. These age-related characteristics are entirely consistent with a genuine nineteenth-century sheet. Please examine the image carefully before purchasing.

Description:

A scarce original botanical plate from John Traherne Moggridge's Contributions to the Flora of Mentone, first issued in London by L. Reeve & Co. in 1864. Moggridge was both the botanist and the artist: the plants were drawn from his own close study of the flora of Mentone and the Mediterranean Riviera, then reproduced as lithographs and individually coloured by hand.

Moggridge was regarded by his contemporaries as an exceptionally careful naturalist. When the completed work was reviewed in Nature in 1871, its illustrations were praised as beautifully drawn by the author himself and exquisitely coloured. The complete work ultimately contained 99 hand-coloured lithographic plates.

These are original leaves from the 1864 publication, not later reproductions. More than 160 years old, they retain the delicacy and individuality of nineteenth-century hand colouring and make unusually decorative botanical studies in their own right.