Hortus Nitidissimis omnem per annum superbiens floribus: Balsamina I- Plate 80

Nuremberg:: Trew, Christoph Jakob and Wirsing, A.L.,, 1750-86.. first. Fine with original hand-coloring. A Fine original hand-colored copperplate engraving. Folio (12.5/8 x 19.25 inches, 32.05 x 48.89 cm). Presented matted in an Ivory rag mat with gilt line decoration. Sized to 18.5 x 24.5 inches, 46.99 x 62.23 cm). One of the rarest, and most elusive, of all botanical works. As stated in Gordon Dunthorne's Flower and Fruit Prints of the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries, London. 1938: Hortus Nitidissimis is one of the finest records of the cultivated flowers of the period, containing full-sized coloured of the figures. This is the showiest of the Florilegia; garden and florist's flowers painted for their beauty opposed to their scientific appeal. Many of the botanicals were rendered and appropriately credited to Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708-70). Ehret's contribution to the art of botanical illustration is so instrumental, that in his well-referenced and essential tome of the same name, Wilfred Blunt credits Ehret for an entire period of botanical illustration: The Age of Ehret. In Hortus Nitidissimis, Ehret's contributions were honored, unlike the fate that befell him from his involvement with Weinmann's Phytanthoza Iconographia (1737-45). The author of Hortus Nitidissimis was Ehret's friend and colleague Dr. Christoph Jakob Trew (1695-1769), a celebrated Nuremberg doctor, who also rewrote and reissued the botanical work of Elizabeth Blackwell's A Curious Herbal in 1747-1773, illustrated with plates engraved by N. F. Eisenberger.