White, Red and Yellow Dead Nettles, Antique Botanical Print, Pratt, circa 1873

Printed in color in London for Frederick Warne and Co., this original antique plate from Anne Pratt's British flora shows the yellow weasel snout with five British dead nettles. Yellow hooded flowers of Galeobdolon luteum are carried in whorls up the center of the sheet, and the white dead nettle opens its long cream flowers at the right. Rose pink flowers of the intermediate and henbit dead nettles crowd the left, the red dead nettle at the lower right, and the crinkled heart shaped leaves of all of them, some of them washed with bronze, fill the lower half of the page.

Anne Pratt's survey of the British flora appeared in six volumes from Frederick Warne and Co. of Covent Garden, London, the five volumes of flowering plants issued first and the volume of grasses, sedges and ferns added in 1873 to complete the set. Volume IV, from which this plate comes, carries 249 species printed in color, and the title page also names the New York agents Scribner, Welford and Armstrong.

What makes Pratt's plates worth hanging is her method. Each species is given whole, with root, stem, leaf, flower and often the ripe fruit on the same sheet, and several related species are grouped together so that the differences between them can be read at a glance. The result is a composition rather than a specimen sheet, and it reads as a picture at a distance and as botany close up.

Even age toning. Handling soiling along the bottom, right and top edges. Slight wear at the bottom right and top left corners.

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