Redouté Choix Pl. 40, Crown Imperial Fritillary

From the imperial French gardens to your home, this Oppenheimer Kew Gardens Edition of Redouté Choix Pl. 40, Crown Imperial Fritillary promises to elevate and refine any space.

Printed with archival pigment on rag watercolor paper, this facsimile print faithfully captures the delicate detail of Redouté’s original stipple engraving. Elevate your environment with a flower from the empress’ garden!

About Choix des plus belles Fleurs

First published in 1827 and subsequently in 1835, Redouté’s Choix des plus belles fleurs et des plus beaux fruits, or Choice of the most beautiful flowers and most beautiful fruits contains 144 plates depicting the most attractive botanicals he had encountered throughout his long-lasting career as a royal flower painter. Many of the plants were rendered from fruits and flowers cultivated within the French imperial gardens and other notable botanical collections.

The plates are printed in color through a method called stipple engraving with the finishing touches of color applied by hand. Stipple engraving is different from line engraving in that the imagery is made up of a series of dots rather than a continuous line. As a result, the print has a soft delineation of form that is particularly well suited to the delicate subject matter. The 1835 edition can be visually distinguished from the 1827 edition through the presence of a plate number after Redouté’s name in the bottom left margin of the print.

The Oppenheimer Kew Gardens Edition of Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s Choix des plus belles Fleurs offers a selection of his most remarkable and sought-after plates from this folio as modern fine art prints in a limited edition of 300. The modern prints are exacting facsimiles of the Redouté folio housed in the library at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew.

About Pierre-Joseph Redouté

Recognized as the royal designer and painter for three successive French Empresses, Marie-Antoinette, Josephine Bonaparte, and Marie-Amelie, Belgian artist Pierre-Joseph Redouté etched his name into the history of botanical art through his magnificent floral folios. Three of his major works, Les Liliacées, Les Roses, and Choix des plus belles fleurs, were produced under royal patronage and depict plants from the French imperial gardens. His botanical prints, rendered through the innovative technique of stipple engraving, received a fervent welcome and were praised for their soft modulation of form and delicate coloring.

Despite the political tumult that characterizes turn-of-the-century France, from the overthrow of the Bourbon empire, the reign of Napoleon, and the July Revolution of 1830, Redouté continued to methodically produce beautifully serene folios of flowers in stark contrast to his violent historical backdrop. His work was highly respected in his time and continues to be prized today.

About Oppenheimer Editions

Established in 1999, our publishing company Oppenheimer Editions was developed in order to produce modern facsimiles of historic works of art. Marrying cutting-edge digital printing technologies with canonical works of art, Oppenheimer Editions has partnered with prestigious museums to make their holdings accessible to the public as fine art prints. Works from the New-York Historical Society’s unrivaled collections of John James Audubon’s watercolors and the Hudson River School paintings are examples of art that otherwise would be unobtainable.

Among the institutional collections we have partnered with are the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum, and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Our Oppenheimer Editions prints are not mere reproductions. Rather, they are limited-edition fine art prints made with the finest quality archival pigments on rag watercolor paper and executed to exacting standards.

For more information about the Oppenheimer Kew Gardens edition of Redouté Choix Pl. 40, Crown Imperial Fritillary, email us at [email protected] or check out our articles Plant Mutations in the Botanical Prints of Pierre-Joseph Redouté, The Historical Significance of Botanical Illustration, and The Interrelation between Natural History Art and Porcelain Ornamentation.

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