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Botanical Vintage Prints of Scarlet Sophronitis and Tropical Bloom, c.1845
$270 (£205, €240)
Period original, not a reproduction.
Shipped from the Netherlands, flat, insured and tracked, worldwide. Returns accepted within 14 days.
- Date
- 1845
- Size
- 6.7 × 9.8 in (17 × 25 cm)
- Condition
- Very good, given age. General age-related toning and/or occasional minor defects from handling. Please study scan carefully.
- Period
- Early 19th century
- Artist or book
- Louis van Houtte
- Section
- Botanical
- Reference
- f_41416102
Two orchids and a tropical flower from Louis van Houtte's Flore des Serres et des Jardins de l'Europe, issued in Ghent about 1845, shown as two chromolithographs. The first is lettered "Sophronitis coccinea Rchb. fil.", with the origin "Rio-de-Janeiro" and the note "Serre chaude"; the second "Dircaea Blassii", with the origin "Amér. trop." and the note "Serre tempérée".
On the first sheet, a compact tuft of dark green leaves clings to a mossy base and carries a group of large, bright scarlet-orange flowers, their rounded petals open in all directions. On the second, a green central crown of seed-like buds sits at the top of a stem, with long, narrow, tubular scarlet flowers radiating around it in a fan, their tips curled back.
Van Houtte's series, with plates by Charles Lemaire and others, showed the new plants of the greenhouses of Ghent to European growers. The notes on each plate record where the plant came from and how it was to be grown: here Brazil and tropical America, in a warm and a temperate greenhouse.
