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PIERRE-JOSEPH REDOUTE- 

 RAPHAEL OF THE SUCCULENTS" 



With bibliographical and botanical details of over two hundred published plates. 



By GORDON D. ROWLEY 



No one, to my knowledge, has attempted a survey of famous illustrators of succulent plants, or laid down 

 rules for our guidance on what constitutes a good picture of one. It seems to have been taken for granted that 

 succulents differ in no wise from other garden plants in the demands they make on the botanical artist : if he 

 excels at the one it is assumed that he will naturally excel at the other, too. This is but one of the many interesting 

 points that arise in considering the work of one of the most gifted, fortunate, prolific and certainly the most 

 popular of all botanical painters : Pierre-Joseph Redoute (1759-1840). 



Since the invention of printing the scope of botanical illustration has ranged trom woodcuts to lithographed 

 plates; from hand-coloured drawings to habitat photographs; from the crudest inaccuracies and '* arty " 

 bouquets to volumes of plates so superbly drawn and reproduced that each one can be framed as a work of art 

 and sold at a high price to collectors. A good published illustration of a plant is something to be marvelled at. 

 It proclaims a concerted effort from a team of experts : a painter who is both artist and botanist, skilled engravers, 

 block-makers and other technicians to reproduce his work with minimum distortion, and, most important of 

 all, a sponsor willing to risk money on the whole costly proceeding. The fame of Redoute today— and to judge 

 from current prices none of his rivals is more sought after— rests on just this rare coincidence of events. As 

 Blunt has pointed out^'^ Redoute is by no means the only claimant to the title of " The Raphael of the Flowers," 

 but his equals lacked the means to publish and popularise their work, or had to be content with inferior 

 reproductions of it. 



Pierre-Joseph Redoute was born in St. Hubert, Luxembourg, but spent much of his life in and around Paris. 

 Historians describe him as short, thick-set, ugly and stumpy-fingered, betraying in his appearance little of the 

 geniality, diligence, delicacy of touch and exquisite artistic sensibility that brought him renown, and had every 

 aspiring artist in Paris longing to be his pupil. He studied botanical draughtsmanship in Paris under G. van 

 Spaendonck. founder of the French school of flower painting which was to achieve unrivalled heights in the 

 half-century preceding the death of Redoute and Turpin in 1840. His botanical training came mainly from 

 C. L. L'Heritier, for many of whose books he did the illustrations. During the short period that Redoute held 

 office as draughtsman to the cabinet of Queen Marie Antoinette an incident occurred that is our first record of his 

 encounter with succulents, and may well have initiated the great work he was later to do on these plants. 

 During her long imprisonment in the Temple, Marie Antoinette kept up her spirits by watching the daily growth 

 of buds on a favourite night-blooming Cereus. '^ When the great day arrived for the first flower to open, Redoute 

 was summoned and painted the flower at midnight before the assembled court and royal family. Doubtless the 

 plant was Selenicereus grandiflorus : it would be interesting to know if the painting survives among the large 

 collection of vellums in Paris. At all events, we can be sure that when L'Heritier later suggested to Redoute 

 the idea of a book devoted to succulents, the artist responded eagerly. L'Heritier, for his part, felt the need of 

 good pictures of succulents, as they were impossible to preserve adequately in herbaria and often flowered for 

 brief periods only. Redoute had been experimenting on an improved method of colour-printing, and was glad 

 of a chance to put it into practice. He combined stipple engraving, which allows the finest gradations of shading 

 with colour printing from a single plate which was re-inked after each impression. The result was then touched 

 up by hand so that finally it had the appearance and merits of an original watercolour. 



By the time the - Plantes Grasses " was contemplated. Redoute had gained the blessing of the Empress 

 Josephine, who not only assembled a great collection of rare plants in her garden at Malmaison, but subsidised 

 the publication of Redoute's paintings of them in books such as this and - Les Liliacees " (1802-16) " Jardin de la 

 Malmaison " (1803-5), " Descriptions des Plantes Rares Cultivees a Malmaison . ." (1812-7) and " Les Roses - 

 (1817-24). All that was needed to complete the - Plantes Grasses." the first of this noble series, was a botanist 

 to write the text for each picture. L'Heritier. apparently, did not wish to do this himself. Here again fate played 

 nto their hands by conjuring up a keen, twenty-year-old Swiss student : Augustin Pyramus de Candolle, destined 

 to become one of the great names in systematic botany. 



arS'^T^r'T'^ r"^ 'TJ"'''^ ''""^ '" "'"'"'• ""^ ^'' ''"'^ ^^^"^-^ by the French Revolution and 

 other pohtical upheavals around him. By his own endeavours he earned fame and fortune, but he v.as not thrifty 



and _,n later years was reduced to producing " pot-boilers " or selections of his earlier plates, and even to selling 



furn.ture and valuables to make ends meet. He died in poverty in his eighty-first year while sketching a st 



flower pamtmg that would have brought him fresh laurels and a temporary release from fmanci 



lai worries. 



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