Four British Goosefoots, Antique Wild Plant Print by Anne Pratt, circa 1873

An original antique color plate, Plate 176 of Volume IV of Anne Pratt's The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns of Great Britain, showing four British goosefoots, the common weeds of waste ground and the farmyard. Loose green flowering spikes rise across the sheet, one of them dusted with the pale mealy bloom that gives the white goosefoot its name. Broad toothed leaves shaped like a goose foot spread at the left and the lower center in fresh and gray green, and the tall ribbed stems carry the eye up the page.

The plate comes from The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns of Great Britain, and their allies the Club Mosses, Pepperworts and Horsetails, written and drawn by Anne Pratt and published in London by Frederick Warne and Co. of Bedford Street, Covent Garden. The work runs to six volumes and was issued under the direction of the Committee of General Literature and Education appointed by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. This sheet belongs to Volume IV, whose title page records 249 species printed in color.

A plate from this flora carries its period in every line: the close observation, the crowded but orderly arrangement, the soft printed color laid over careful outline. It sits as comfortably in a modern interior as in a Victorian one, and it has the advantage over a single flower study of giving several related plants together, which makes it rewarding to look at more than once.

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

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