PBA Galleries

A lovely set of these remarkable still-life engravings of flowers, the result of the collaboration of three leading figures in their respective fields in England in the first half of the eighteenth century: the artist Pieter Casteels, the engraver Henry Fletcher, and the nurseryman Robert Furber. The publication was conceived as both a commercial venture, to sell bound sets of the engravings, and as a high quality seed catalogue for Furber`s nursery at Kensington. The exquisite hand-colored prints depict over 400 different species of flowers which are grouped according to the month in which they bloom, set in vases. Each flower is numbered and keyed to a legend at the bottom of the plate so that customers could easily order what they fancied. This was the first commercial horticultural catalogue of its time and as such, it represents a defining point in the history of botanical illustration and horticultural literature in Britain. The commercial success of the publication led to the publication of a companion series, the Twelve Months of the Year in Fruit of 1733, which Casteels also designed in conjunction with Furber. This set does not include the subscriber's list/title leaf, which was issued later and is often not present. It is otherwise complete with all the monthly flower engravings, very rare thus. Blunt p. 57; BMNH II.632; Dunthorne 117; Henrey 733; Nissen BBI 674. Provenance: purchased by the current owner from the Old Print Shop in New York.