THE ROSES

The refined and revered tradition of botanical illustration, produced under aristocratic patronage, stretches back to the Renaissance. It emerged out of the desire to catalogue nature in all its wild splendour, and it was a process that demanded the most precise and skilful of artists.

French flower painter Pierre-Joseph Redouté is often viewed as one of the last and the best of these painters and engravers. Commissioned by among others, Napoleon''s Josephine, Redouté studied with the finest flower painters in France and Amsterdam, and developed a breathtaking skill at translating his observations of nature onto paper. His illustrations of the botanical alphabets of D.-M. Guillamain were a landmark in flower painting for their accuracy and beauty. He was also an innovator in the techniques of printing, introducing ''stipple-engraving'' to France, always striving for greater exactitude in his art.

This is a glorious and completely faithful reproduction of his most celebrated work ''Les Roses'', which was published in three volumes between 1817 and 1824. In ''Les Roses'' he turns his attention to that most romantic and evocative of subjects, and this handsome volume preserves every detail of Redouté''s masterful representation of nature''s gifts.