Cattleya Labiata Vintage 1990 Print

A colour print, rescued from a disbound book of Plant prints from 1990, with unrelated text on the reverse. Original printing date 1821, this is a reprint.

Suitable for framing, size is approx 8.25" x 12" or 20.5cm x 31cm printed edge to edge.

This is a vintage print not a modern copy and can show signs of age or previous use commensurate with the age of the print. Please view any scans as they form part of the description.

All pictures will be sent bagged and in a board backed envelope for protection in transit.

While every care is taken to ensure my scans or photos accurately represent the item offered for sale, due to differences in monitors and internet pages my pictures may not be an exact match in brightness or contrast to the actual item.

Text taken from the opposite page. Please note this cannot be supplied with the print due to being on the reverse side of the previous print. Any spelling errors are due to the OCR program used.

Cattleya labiata. Engraving by C. Fox after a drawing by John Curtis, coloured by hand. Plate 33 from John Lindley's Collectanea botanica, 1821-1825.

John Curtis's portrait of Cattleya labiata was taken "from a specimen which flowered in Mr Cattley's stove last November [1818]". It was "without exception . . . the handsomest species of the order that we have ever seen alive". Thus wrote John Lindley, who planned the publication of his Collectanea botanica when he was a young man of about twenty, helping Robert Brown in Banks' Library and Herbarium. It was to appear in monthly parts, illustrating "rare and exotic plants", and he was determined that "neither care nor cost should be spared in making it worthy of public support: . . . the price was only calculated to defray the actual expense of its publication". However, by 1821, when the first part was issued circumstances had forced him to "resolve upon abandoning the undertaking after the publication of four more numbers"; and so the enterprise came to a premature end in 1825. Forty coloured plates and one plain one had been published; most were by Lindley himself, though five other artists, including Ferdinand Bauer, John Curtis and William Hooker, contributed drawings.
Several of the plates are of orchids, a group of plants which particularly interested Lindley, and on which he became the leading authority. He named Cattleya after his patron William Cattley and expressed his pleasure at being able to pay this compliment "to a gentleman whose unrivalled successes in the cultivation [of orchids] have long since given him the strongest claims to such a distinction". Cattleya labiata was the first orchid to attract the envy of collectors. According to Lindley, it was found "by Swainson in the Brasils and sent by him to Dr W.J. Hooker" (see Page 93). Tradition has it that Cattley grew his plant from orchid material used as packaging by Swainson.
The artist John Curtis, like Lindley, came from Norfolk. In 1817 he went to London, where he met many of the leading biologists of the day, including Lindley. The following year he became resident artist to the Botanical Magazine, to which, over a period of thirteen years, he contributed more than four hundred plates. He does not seem to have been related to William Curtis, the magazine's famous founder. Entomology rather than botany, however, had long been his primary interest, and the work by which he is best known, British Entomology, was published in monthly parts during this same period. When failing eyesight forced him to give up descriptive biological work, he devoted himself to studying insects in a more practical way. His work in the field of pest control led to his being described as "a pioneer in a new epoch. . . one of the first professional scientists". Like the great garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, he became famous through a second career, forced upon him by the same adversity.