Prints from Pierre-Antoine Poiteau's
Pomologie Française [1846]

Pierre-Antoine Poiteau. Pomologie Française. Recueil des Plus Beaux Fruits Cultivés en France. . . . Paris: Langlois et Leclercq, 1846. Approximately 12 x 9 1/2 (plate size). Stipple engravings, printed in color à la poupée. Finished by hand. Excellent condition.

An exquisite group of fruit prints done during the heyday of French botanical illustration. These elegant cuttings of ripe fruit, seen also in cross section and with their blossoms, were drawn by A. Poiteau (1766-1854) and P.J.F. Turpin (1775-1840). Their drawings were transferred into stipple engravings by a group of some twenty carefully picked artists and color-printed by Langlois, the great French color-printer who supervised much of Redouté’s work. The renown of the French botanical artists and engravers of this period is well justified by the aristocratic and sophisticated character of their work. The prints are all the more desirable for their rarity as fruit prints of the highest quality. “Turpin and Poiteau collaborated in some of the most important botanical publications of the early years of the nineteenth century...” Wilfred Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration, p. 208. These exquisite prints do indeed live up to their reputation as coming from one of the finest and rarest books on fruit.