Antique Pear Plate with Bon Chretien and Doyenne, Knoop, 1790

A hand-colored copper engraving of ten named pear varieties, each lettered with its name and the months in which it ripens. The plate gathers several of the most celebrated European pears: Bon Chretien d'Automne or Herfst-Bon Chretien, Bencré blanc or Doyenne, Bergamot or Sappige Groentje, Bergam. Crassane, Messire Jean, Vermeillion, Grand Bretagne, Hallemine bonne, Dubb. Riet-Peer and Bergamot Suisse ronde. The bergamots are drawn squat and round, the Bon Chretien tall and tapering, so that the two classic pear silhouettes can be compared across one sheet. Knoop worked from the living fruit, noting the russet freckling and the way a stalk sets into the crown. Original watercolor lies over the engraved hatching in uneven washes, deepest on the sunward blush and thin to nothing on the shaded side.

This sheet was published at Amsterdam and Dordrecht in 1790 by Allart, Holtrop, de Leeuw and Krap, in Johann Hermann Knoop's description and figures of the best sorts of apples and pears, introduced by Johannes Florentius Martinet. Knoop had charge of the Mariënburg garden at Leeuwarden and knew his fruit as a working gardener rather than a compiler, which is why his plates are still consulted on old Dutch varieties. Each is a copper engraving finished by hand in watercolor, the washes sitting over the engraved line and varying in strength from fruit to fruit as only hand color does.

Bon Chretien and Doyenne are names that still mean something to anyone who grows pears, the first reaching back to the fifteenth century and the second surviving in orchards through the Doyenné family. Setting them beside the Swiss and Crassane bergamots, with the eating months under each, gave an eighteenth-century buyer everything needed to plan a succession of fruit from September into January. That practical purpose is what lifts Knoop's plates above decorative botany. The soft greens and ambers suit a dining room particularly well, and the sheet makes an elegant companion to one of the apple plates from the same series.

Light uneven toning, browner towards the edges. Marked handling soiling along the right and top edges. Scattered foxing in the margin. Slight wear at the bottom right and top right corners. Minor edge wear, shallow nicks along the right.

This is an original antique plate, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.