WARNER, Robert; Benjamin Samuel Williams; Thomas Moore.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

The Orchid Album, comprising coloured figures and descriptions of new, rare, and beautiful orchidaceous plants. First edition of this magnificent work, one of the great orchid books of the 19th century. The Orchid Album was published at the height of the "orchidelirium" that had been building in Britain for some decades, until it seized the imaginations of late Victorian horticulturists in the same way that the tulip craze inflamed the minds of collectors in Golden Age Holland. The British horticultural writer Anna Pavord notes: "some of the grander Victorian growers, such as the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth in Derbyshire and the Duke of Northumberland at Syon House in Middlesex, employed their own collectors, but orchid fanciers like John Day acquired their best treasures at auction. Nurserymen such as James Veitch, Conrad Loddiges and Benjamin Samuel Williams of the Victoria and Paradise Nurseries in Upper Holloway, regularly sent consignments of orchids to be auctioned by Messrs Stevens of King St, Covent Garden. It was in their sale room that, after an epic battle with a fellow enthusiast, Sir Trevor Lawrence, a contemporary of Day's, acquired the one single plant of Aerides lawrenciae imported by Frederick Sander from the Philippines".The stunning plates are the work of John Nugent Fitch (1840-1927), the nephew of Walter Hood Fitch. His "work was more flamboyant than that of such predecessors as Ehret, Redouté, or the Bauer brothers, combining botanical accuracy with

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