The Indigo Plant,
the southeast Asian plant used to make blue
indigo dyes. (Village Antiques also has in its
inventory a very interesting set of Diderot
prints on the making of Indigo).
These extraordinary handcolored
copperplate engravings come from one
of the great masterpieces of 18th Century
Botanical Illustration, the Plantae Selectae
(Selected Plants) written by Jakob Trew
and illustrated by Georg Dionysius Ehret.
The book had 100 plates of some of the worlds
most beautiful plants.
These exceptional illustrations were the result of the collaboration
of three great 18th Century talents. The Nuremberg Doctor and publisher
Christoph Jakob Trew (1695-1769) had a fascination with botany, and developed
an admiration for the work of Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708-1770), a brilliant
watercolorist from Heidelberg. The two became close friends and worked on a
number of projects together. For Plantae Selectae, they hired one of the greatest
engravers of the time, Johann Jakob Haid, a native of Augsburg. Haid
also hand colored the sheets, working directly from the watercolor models prepared
by Ehret.
The titles on these plates are all heightened in gold.
The hand coloring is exquisite. All are in very good to excellent condition
(See specific notes on the related pages).
Condition: Very good to excellent. Some faint
browing of sheet. The high light generated by
the scan makes the light discoloration look
slightly more prounounced in these images than
it does to the naked eye.
