From Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s finely stippled engravings of roses, lilies and silken-petalled tulips to Andy Warhol’s 1964 silkscreen of four hibiscus blooms, some of the most famous images of flowers in art are prints.
Although plants have been inspiring printmakers ever since the earliest woodcuts in China, the genre received a considerable boost in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when advances in printmaking, specifically the refinement of copperplate engraving and the invention of lithography (in which an image is drawn onto a limestone block) coincided with the golden age of horticultural discovery. Artists such as Georg Dionysius Ehret, James Sowerby and Redouté produced exquisite engravings of watercolours (often their own), which were as beautiful as they were botanically accurate.
Artists can now practise any number of techniques, which can be broadly categorised into
