Gather ye roses

Can there be many spare bedrooms in the country that do not have at least one, and probably four, prints of Redouté rose engravings hanging on the walls? I know ours does.

Can there be many spare bedrooms in the country that do not have at least one, and probably four, prints of Redouté rose engravings hanging on the walls? I know ours does. People who do not think they know the name of a single botanical artist will have heard of Pierre-Joseph Redouté, the 19th-century Belgian-born artist who did so much to instil the French (and later the English) with an enduring love for the rose.

He did this by painting roses most faithfully and sensitively, in watercolour on vellum. These paintings were then engraved, using the copper-plate technique called ‘stipple engraving’, for inclusion in the three volumes of Les Roses, which were published between 1817 and 1824. This engraving technique beautifully emulated the complexity and tones of the original watercolours. (By the by, one of the finest of modern botanical artists, Bryan Poole, also employs this technique.)

Redouté achieved his early fame against a background of revolution in France. He was originally court painter to King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, yet managed to survive the Terror, emerging once more into the limelight as artist to the Empress Joséphine, for whom he painted a series called ‘Les Liliacées’ (1802–16). Her garden at Malmaison boasted 10,000 roses in 500 varieties, grown in clumps along a stream and in greenhouses.

She died in 1814, not long before Waterloo and Napoleon Bonaparte’s downfall, so never saw Redouté’s Les Roses published. He originally intended to paint 100 roses; in the end, so many interesting species were coming in from overseas that the final tally was 170.