Redouté and Rousseau, 1805

REDOUTÉ, Pierre Joseph (1759–1840), artist and ROUSSEAU, Jean Jacques (1712–1778). La Botanique. Paris: Delachaussée and Garnery, 1805.

First edition, first issue, large-paper copy of Redouté’s beautifully illustrated edition of Rousseau’s Lettres Elementaires sur la Botanique (published posthumously in Rousseau’s Oeuvres, 1782). Redouté was commissioned to produce an illustrated edition of the Lettres, and this work was part of his earliest color-printed masterpieces of botanical illustration, appearing simultaneously with his illustrations for Ventenat’s Jardin de la Malmaison (1802–1805) and with the early volumes of Les Liliacées (1802–1817). Like that work, this one employs stipple-engraved plates, printed in colors by Langlois. Various engravers prepared the plates after Redouté’s originals.

Rousseau was an amateur botanist and, especially after his exile to Switzerland in 1764, he assembled herbaria of pressed flowers and plants, and studied botany with Adanson and others. The Lettres were first written at the request of Rousseau's friend, Madame Étienne Delessert, on behalf of her daughter's private study of botany. When the book was finally published it proved very popular. Specific to this edition, John Ruskin was among the many to find inspiration in Redouté's sumptuous glorification of Rousseau's writing. In 1878, he wrote to his friend, the bookseller F.S. Ellis: "Please at once set your Paris agents to look out for all the copies that come up, at any sale, of Rousseau’s Botanique with coloured plates, 1805–and buy all they can get ... Mind, this order for Rousseau is quite serious" (The Works of John Ruskin, edited by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, London 1906). In fact, Ellis’s agents were unable to locate any copies. This copy has the first issue plates, printed before the plates were titled, and with plate 54 misnumbered 62. The work was issued in a variety of formats, including a quarto edition and, in 1824, an octavo edition. Hunt, Catalogue of Redoutéana 15; Stafleu and Cowan TL2 9688 ("some of [Redoute's] best work"); Dunthorne 252; Great Flower Books, p. 134; Nissen BBI 1688.

Folio (517 x 340mm). With stipple-engraved vignette of a flowering twig on the title and 65 stipple-engraved plates, printed in colors and finished by hand (some foxing to text and margins of plates). Contemporary half calf, spine gilt in compartments with raised bands (light wear, lower corners showing). Provenance: Henry Rogers Broughton, Lord Fairhaven, 1900–1973 (armorial bookplate; his sale Sotheby’s 18 May 2022, lot 190).