Centaury and Least Gentianella, Antique Pink Wild Flower Plate, circa 1873

Printed in color in London for Frederick Warne and Co., this original antique plate from Anne Pratt's British flora shows the least gentianella with four British centauries. Flat topped clusters of rose pink stars fill the upper right of the sheet, carried on upright stems with neat opposite leaves, and a dense tuft of buds and open flowers sits below them. At the left the slender Cicendia filiformis rises on thread like stems with small yellow flowers, and the roots of several plants are drawn at the foot.

The plate belongs to The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns of Great Britain, London, Frederick Warne and Co., the illustrated flora that Anne Pratt wrote and drew and that the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge put its name behind. Volume IV, from which this sheet comes, carries the bindweeds, the gentians, the labiates, the primroses and the docks, and its title page names the New York house of Scribner, Welford and Armstrong as well as Warne in London.

The work was one of the first thorough illustrated floras of Britain aimed at the ordinary reader rather than the specialist, and the price was only possible because the plates were printed in color instead of being colored by hand. That technical choice is part of what the sheet records, and it put a reliable colored figure of every British species within reach of a wide public for the first time.

Even age toning. Marked handling soiling along the right and top edges. Scattered light foxing in the margin. Slight wear at the bottom left corner. Several larger brown marks.

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