THE ART OF BOTANICAL ILLUSTRATION. By Wilfrid Blunt. New Naturalist No. 14.

1950 1st edition. Large 8vo (152 x 222mm). Ppxxxii,304. Colour and b/w plates from paintings, b/w illustrations, bibliographies. Green buckram, spine titled in gilt.

This is a solid and scholarly piece of art history, which also contains much information of practical use. "There have been in the past occasional studies of the work of individual botanical artists and accounts of particular periods of botanical illustration, but Mr. Wilfrid Blunt is the first to undertake a complete and critical survey of the whole subject." Blunt was an artist and art historian, much of whose career was spent as an art teacher at one or other public school. Wilfrid Blunt was the brother of Sir Anthony Blunt, KGB. Chapters include: The botanical artist; The legacy of antiquity; The rebirth of naturalism; The first printed herbals; The herbals of Brunfels and Fuchs; The decline of the woodcut; Some flower painters of the late sixteenth century; The early etchers and metal engravers; Rabel, Robert and Aubriet; Holland - the flower-piece and the Dutch influence; Some botanical books of the late 17th and early 18th centuries; The age of Ehret; West and East; the age of Redoute; The Botanical Magazine; Kilburn, Sowerby and Sydenham Edwards; Francis and Ferdinand Bauer; Thornton and the Temple of Flora; England in the early 19th century; Walter Fitch, the age of the lithograph; John Ruskin; The 20th century; 500 years of botanical illustration. Appended is a series of articles by W.H. Fitch on botanical drawing, from the Gardeners' Chronicle, 1869.