Botanical Prints

Plants recorded before photography, and then with it. Engraved floras and specimen plates drawn by people who had to look very hard — and the cyanotypes Anna Atkins made by laying the plant itself on light-sensitive paper and carrying it into the sun.

What is in here. Two bodies of work, mostly. The algae from Atkins's Photographs of British Algae (1843–1853), printed from the copy she gave to Sir John Herschel, now in the New York Public Library. And the ferns from Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, 1853, which she made with her friend Anne Dixon and which is now in the Getty — half British bog and hedgerow, half a correspondence network, with plants arriving pressed flat from Jamaica, Ceylon, Brazil and New Jersey. The album belongs to the fern craze of the 1850s, and it is the harmless end of that craze: the plants were picked once, printed, and are still here.

Why the sheets look so different from one another. Nothing in these plates was composed. Where the stalks fell is where they printed. So one sheet is dense lace, the next is a single broad blade, the next is two undivided leaves and a great deal of blue. We choose across that range on purpose, so that a wall of them is a set rather than the same picture five times.

Whole sheets. Nothing is cropped to fill a frame size, and no species name or engraved caption is trimmed away. Where the coated paper runs past the height a museum catalogues — which happens on every Getty fern sheet — we print the object, not the catalogue entry, and say so on the page. Each product page names the holding institution and the accession number, and the file comes from that institution directly rather than from a stock library.

Giclée prints from museum digitisations, twelve pigment inks on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, generous white border, ready to frame or mat. Unframed, shipped rolled in a tube.