Pair of Antique Prints of Mediterranean Rock Ferns, Britten, circa 1885

A set of two original antique chromolithographs of rock spleenworts and cloak ferns from James Britten's European Ferns, published in London by Cassell, circa 1885, and sold together as one set of two sheets. Plate 15 shows four rock spleenworts in the clefts of a gray boulder field: the forked spleenwort, Asplenium septentrionale, with its grass like tufts, Petrarch's spleenwort, Asplenium petrarchae, the alternate leaved spleenwort and the Alpine Asplenium seelosii. Enlarged pinnules of each are arranged across the top of the sheet. Plate 27 shows two woolly cloak ferns of the dry Mediterranean rocks, Notholaena lanuginosa and Notholaena marantae, drawn green above and tawny beneath, with the tiny annual Jersey fern, Gymnogramma leptophylla, between them. Six enlarged pinnules across the top show the felted undersides.

Published in London by Cassell, European Ferns was the work of the botanist James Britten, 1846 to 1924, of the British Museum, with thirty plates drawn from living plants by David Blair. The parts first came out between 1879 and 1881; this copy bears the Cassell and Company, Limited imprint used from 1883 onward, so it is a later issue of circa 1885. Unlike most fern books of the period, which kept to the British flora, Britten's covers species from Madeira to Scandinavia and the Caucasus. The plates were printed in color by Vincent Brooks, Day and Son of London, one of the foremost chromolithographic printers of Victorian England, and the lithographers' credit appears at the lower right of the image. The color is printed throughout, built up from separate stones, not applied by hand.

Both sheets show the small, tough ferns of sunny southern rocks, drawn among the stones where they grow. Fern collecting was a national passion in Victorian Britain, a craze contemporaries called pteridomania, and books like this one supplied the accurate pictures that collectors used to name the plants in their ferneries and glass cases. For a collector of botanical prints they are an easy way to add a whole group from one named Victorian book.

Even age toning throughout. Handling soiling along the edges of both sheets. Light foxing in the margins of both sheets. All corners complete on every sheet.

These are original antique prints, not modern reproductions. They are two original sheets sold together as one lot, and the set is never split. This item is sold unframed.