{"product_id":"the-night-blowing-cereus-thorntons-temple-of-flora-vintage-botanical-print","title":"The Night-blowing Cereus · Thornton's Temple of Flora · Vintage Botanical Print","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe Night-blowing Cereus\u003c\/strong\u003e - a colour-printed, hand-finished plate from Robert Thornton's The Temple of Flora, published in London between 1799 and 1807.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"The Night-blowing Cereus\", 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe most famous plate in the book: the cactus that flowers for a single night, shown by the light of a full moon with a church clock across the water, the flower painted by Reinagle and the moonlight by Pether.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eReproduced from a high-resolution scan of an original page of the Temple of Flora, printed whole with its engraved title and imprint. Each print is made to order on cotton-fibre archival paper, then mounted with a wide even border and hand-framed in our workshop rather than sent out.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Natural History Room","offers":[{"title":"46cm x 61cm","offer_id":55495104397653,"sku":"THORNTON012-M-46X61","price":56.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0886\/6414\/6261\/files\/gallery-0_0ec30c4e-b569-4d51-bc25-76ea5370943f.jpg?v=1792795915","url":"https:\/\/theposteredit.com\/products\/the-night-blowing-cereus-thorntons-temple-of-flora-vintage-botanical-print","provider":"The Poster Edit","version":"1.0","type":"link"}