Botanical Prints: Artistic Style & Methods

Early botanical books were printed from woodblocks. In a woodcut the designer's drawing was cut in relief by a specialist, which gave bold contours but little room for shading; Fuchs's herbal of 1542 shows the method at its most refined. Hand-colouring, usually by workshop colourists following a model copy, was added afterwards and could double the price of a book.

From the seventeenth century, engraving and etching on copper allowed finer line. The plant was drawn, transferred to a plate, and incised with a burin, so a single drawing could be reproduced in hundreds of impressions. Besler's Hortus Eystettensis is the great early example, and a few copies were coloured by hand for wealthy buyers.

Stipple engraving, in which tone is built from tiny dots rather than lines, gave petals a soft, almost velvety surface and was perfected for flower plates by Redouté and his engravers. Printing in several colours from one plate, with hand finishing, produced the subtlety of the Parisian florilegia. Aquatint and mezzotint were sometimes combined with other methods, as in Thornton's Temple of Flora.

Lithography, invented by Alois Senefelder in the 1790s, replaced the engraver's laborious cutting with drawing on stone. Chromolithography, which uses a separate stone for each colour, made rich colour printing affordable and drove the mass-market floral books of the Victorian age. Nature printing, developed in Vienna in the 1850s, pressed real specimens such as ferns into soft metal to make a printing plate; Bradbury's Nature-Printed British Ferns (1855-56) is a notable British example.

Behind all of these printed forms stood the original: watercolour and bodycolour on paper or vellum, the medium of the Kew and Paris court painters, and the source from which engravers and lithographers worked.