Hyacinths · Thornton's Temple of Flora · Vintage Botanical Print

Hyacinths - a colour-printed, hand-finished plate from Robert Thornton's The Temple of Flora, published in London between 1799 and 1807.

"Hyacinths", a plate from Robert Thornton's The Temple of Flora, published in London between 1799 and 1807 and printed in colour from the engraved copper plate, then finished by hand.

A florist's flower, bred and shown by enthusiasts in eighteenth-century England, where a single prized bloom could change hands for a small fortune.

The Temple of Flora is the most theatrical flower book ever made. Its publisher, the London physician Robert John Thornton, commissioned painters including Philip Reinagle, Peter Henderson and Abraham Pether to set each flower in a landscape of its own - a moonlit river, a mountain pass, a stormy sky - and had the paintings engraved in mezzotint, aquatint and stipple, printed in colour and finished by hand. Issued in parts between 1799 and 1807, it cost Thornton his fortune, and in 1811 he held a lottery to try to recover it.

The plates were made by the leading engravers of the day, among them Richard Earlom, Thomas Sutherland and William Ward, working the copper plates in several techniques at once to give the deep, velvety grounds and luminous skies that set the work apart from every other botanical book of its time.

Reproduced from a high-resolution scan of an original page of the Temple of Flora, printed whole with its engraved title and imprint. Printed on archival cotton-fibre paper when your order is placed, and mounted with a border of equal width on every side so the plate sits centred in the frame.