Curtis's Botanical Magazine Prints

About Curtis's Botanical Magazine

Curtis's Botanical Magazine is the longest-running illustrated botanical periodical in the world. Its founder, William Curtis, born at Alton in Hampshire in 1746, was an apothecary who became demonstrator of plants at the Chelsea Physic Garden and author of the Flora Londinensis; on 1 February 1787 he issued the first number of The Botanical Magazine, or Flower-Garden Displayed, offering gardeners a hand-coloured plate and a page of description for each new garden plant arriving from abroad. Curtis edited thirteen volumes before his death in 1799; John Sims followed, then from 1827 William Jackson Hooker, who took the magazine with him to Kew, and his son Joseph Dalton Hooker. The plates were drawn by a succession of artists: Sydenham Edwards, whose work fills the early volumes, James Sowerby, who engraved the first plate, Walter Hood Fitch, principal artist for forty years until 1877, and Matilda Smith, who drew more than 2,300 plates between 1878 and 1923. The first thirty volumes were copper engravings coloured by hand by up to thirty colourists, so no two copies match exactly. Orchids, lilies, proteas and the exotic blooms of newly opened colonies were its staples, and more than 11,000 plates have been published; the magazine is still issued by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Each plate was made to let a gardener recognise a plant at a glance, and that clarity is why they frame so well.