George Brookshaw Pears, Plate LXXXVI From Pomona Britannica, Hand-Colored Aquatint, Framed English, London, Dated 1807

Details

Description

George Brookshaw Pears, Plate LXXXVI from Pomona Britannica, Hand-Colored Aquatint, Framed
English, London, Dated 1807

This hand-colored aquatint is Plate … Read more George Brookshaw Pears, Plate LXXXVI from Pomona Britannica, Hand-Colored Aquatint, Framed
English, London, Dated 1807

This hand-colored aquatint is Plate LXXXVI from George Brookshaw’s Pomona Britannica, the most ambitious English color-plate book devoted to fruit, and shows the Cadillac, the Paddington and the St. Martial pears against the deep brown aquatinted ground that distinguishes the work. A single pear, flushed with red on its sunward side, hangs above from a short woody spur between broad serrated leaves. Below, two tapering green pears hang from separate twigs: the one at left beside a cluster of smaller leaves tinged russet at their edges, the one at right beneath a spray of long, narrow leaves, its skin freckled with fine russet dots.

The plate is an aquatint with stipple engraving, printed in color and finished by hand, the stipple work carrying the bloom on the skins and the soft gray-green modeling of the leaves. It is presented in a gilt frame with an acid-free mat and Museum Glass.

The dark ground and cool greens suit a dining room, kitchen or library, and the plate hangs well alone or with other fruit plates from the same book, whose uniform framing allows a group to be built over time.

Dimensions
Framed height: 26¼ inches (66.7 cm)
Framed width: 21¼ inches (54 cm)
Framed depth: ¾ inch (1.9 cm)

Inscriptions
Lettered below the image within a ruled cartouche: “PLATE LXXXVI”, and beneath, “Painted & Published as the Act Directs by the Author G. Brookshaw 1807”.

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge.

References
Dunthorne 50
Great Flower Books (1990), p. 81
Nissen BBI 244
Sandra Raphael, An Oak Spring Pomona, 40a

Historical Context
George Brookshaw (1751–1823) was born in Birmingham and moved to London in 1777, where he made his name as a cabinetmaker, supplying painted furniture to the Prince of Wales. No furniture by him is recorded after the mid-1790s, and he re-emerged under the name G. Brown as a flower painter and drawing master. Pomona Britannica was issued in parts from 1804 and completed as a folio in 1812, printed by T. Bensley and dedicated to his former patron, by then Prince Regent. Its ninety plates record 256 varieties of fruit, eleven of them given to pears, drawn largely from the royal gardens at Hampton Court and Kensington and from other gardens around London, among them the Princess of Wales’s at Blackheath. The dark grounds and deliberately arranged compositions set the work apart from the plainer scientific illustration of the period.

(Ref: NY9424-mrr) See less