Pierre-Joseph Redoute (1759-1840)
Pierre-Joseph Redoute has been considered the most famous botanical painter in the world and many of his works hang in palaces and museums. He was the official court painter to Queen Marie Antoinette and Empress Josephine of France.
Born in Belgium in 1759, Redoute was blessed with exceptional artistic talent, much of which was inherited from the artists within the family. At the age of thirteen, Redoute left home and worked as an interior decorator and commission painter. It was during this time that Redoute became acquainted with the work of Dutch flower painters Brueghel, Ruysch, van Huysum and de Heem. He was so captivated with their paintings that this became the direction of his talent for the rest of his life.
In 1782, Redoute moved to Paris, where his brother lived and was introduced to the botanist book lover Charles Louis L’Heritier de Brutelle, who greatly influenced Redoute’s work and life thereafter.
Over his long career, Redoute painted the gardens at the Petite Trianon of Queen Marie-Antoinette as her official court artist. It was during the Revolution and the Reign of Terror that he was appointed to document gardens which became national properties.
In 1804, Redoute was appointed painter to Josephine, Empress to France. While Napoleon was in battle, Josephine bought a property called Malmaison. The property included a small park, some horticultural land and vineyards. Josephine’s great love was the rose and she set out to grow every variety in existence and even had the gardeners creating new hybrids. The rose garden at Malmaison had over 250 varieties. During this time, Redoute began work on what would be his most famous work, Les Roses.
When his appointments as royal painter came to an end, Redoute was appointed Professor of Plant Iconography (the art of accurately representing botanical subjects with illustrations) at the Royal Gardens of France. At the time, this was the most prestigious garden of its kind.
Redoute furthered his work on Les Roses, which was a small volume edition subscribed to by the royalty and wealthy of Europe. A subscriber received four engravings every month. Les Roses was published in Paris from March 1817 through March 1824. The complete volume consists of 160 stipple-engraved plates printed in color and finished by hand. The process of stipple engraving is a method of engraving with dots, rather than with lines, resulting in prints that more clearly simulate the subtle color gradations of the original watercolors. Unlike line engraving, wherein there is one plate, which impresses the paper with dark lines and the image impression later colored, stipple engravings require multiple plates.
To further complicate matters, Redoute enhanced this intricate process by personally highlighting every image with watercolor. This was extremely tedious and time consuming which is why stipple engraving has become a lost art.
The provenance of the original watercolors from Redoute’s Les Roses is a bit of a mystery. An auction booklet from a sale at Sotheby’s in November, 1985, states in part, that the originals were purchased by Redoute’s patroness the Duchesse de Berry for 30,000 francs. They were later offered in the sale of her library in 1837, but were not purchased during the sale. The legend has it that they were destroyed, either during the Revolution of 1848 or in the burning of the Tuileries in the 1871 Commune. These reports were evidently not true because several of the watercolors have surfaced during this century, including the Sotheby’s auction in 1985.