Pierre-Joseph Redouté Prints

About Pierre-Joseph Redouté

Pierre-Joseph Redouté was born in July 1759 at Saint-Hubert in the Ardennes, the son and grandson of painters, and left home at thirteen to earn his living with a brush. He arrived in Paris in 1782 to paint scenery with his brother, and at the Jardin du Roi met the botanist Charles Louis L'Héritier, who taught him to dissect and draw flowers scientifically, and the Dutch flower painter Gerard van Spaendonck, who shaped his watercolour technique. He was appointed draughtsman to Marie Antoinette's cabinet, survived the Revolution, and from 1798 painted the plants of the Empress Joséphine's garden at Malmaison. His great books were printed by stipple engraving, in which the image is built from tiny dots and inked in colour before each impression, then finished by hand: Les Liliacées, eight volumes between 1802 and 1816 with 486 plates of lilies, irises, amaryllis and their kin, and Les Roses, three volumes between 1817 and 1824 with 168 plates of the roses at Malmaison, with botanical text by Claude Antoine Thory. Choix des plus belles fleurs followed in 1827 to 1833. He worked from living plants, published more than 2,100 plates in all, and was master of drawing at the Muséum from 1822. He died in Paris in June 1840. The roses have never been out of print, and a single plate on a wall still reads as the standard against which every flower painting since has been measured.