Exotic Elegance: Silver Vase Plant in Vintage Chromolithographic Art, circa 1890

1890 · Birds, Plants & Natural History

Exotic Elegance: Silver Vase Plant in Vintage Chromolithographic Art, circa 1890

Name: Exotic Elegance: Silver Vase Plant in Vintage Chromolithographic Art, circa 1890
Brand: American Maps and Prints
SKU: BG-13761-13
Price: 135 USD
Availability: InStock

$135

€120 · dollar price at today's exchange rate

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Shipping to the United States: $51 standard, $73 express, insured and tracked.

Date: 1890
Kind: Birds, Plants & Natural History
Size: 15.7 × 25 cm (6.2 × 9.8 in)
Condition: Good. Given age. General age-related toning and/or occasional minor defects from handling. One crease in the right top corner. Text in bottom border cut short. Please study scan carefully.
Period: The Gilded Age
Reference: BG-13761-13

What the condition grades mean

Excellent: Bright and clean, with no faults worth mentioning.
Very good: Only light signs of age, such as faint toning.
Good: Normal signs of age for a sheet of this period: toning, some foxing, small marks or neat old repairs.
Fair: Clear faults such as staining, tears or repairs, priced to match.

Every fault we see is written in the condition note, and the whole sheet is shown uncropped in the photos.

Guaranteed original. This is an original of the period stated, not a later reproduction or print-on-demand copy. If it is ever shown to be otherwise, we refund you in full.

Shipping to the United States. Sent from our gallery in Langweer, the Netherlands, flat between boards or rolled in a tube, and fully insured. Delivery and import charges.

About this piece

A bromeliad rosette in full flower, an original color chromolithograph from the Revue Horticole, circa 1890. The sheet is headed "Revue Horticole" at the upper left, and the lower margin carries the imprint "Godard del." (drawn by Godard) and "Lith. Marotte, Paris". The plant is cataloged as Aechmea fasciata, the silver vase or urn plant, a bromeliad native to Brazil.

The plant is seen from above, filling the sheet. Long, spiny-edged leaves radiate outward from a central cup, arching and curling at the tips, their upper surfaces flushed with brick red and salmon over a grayish green ground. At the heart of the rosette sits a compact head of upright pink and white bracts and small flowers touched with yellow. The coloring is laid on in soft graded washes with fine toothing drawn along the leaf edges, typical of the chromolithographed plant portraits made for French horticultural journals.

Bromeliads of this kind were prized novelties in nineteenth-century European glasshouses, and illustrated journals such as this one introduced them to collectors and nurserymen with a lithographed portrait of each new arrival. The title line at the foot of the sheet is partly cropped.

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