Pierre-Joseph Redouté painted flowers for Marie Antoinette, survived the Revolution, and then painted them for Empress Joséphine, who was building the greatest rose garden in Europe at Malmaison. Between 1817 and 1824 he published Les Roses: 169 plates, stipple-engraved and finished by hand, documenting nearly every rose known in France. Two centuries later it is still the flower book every other one is measured against.
Why these plates look the way they do
Redouté worked in stipple engraving — thousands of tiny dots rather than lines — printed in color à la poupée and then retouched with watercolor. The result is soft, luminous, and botanically exact at the same time: you can see the serrations on a leaf and the bloom on a petal. It is why a Redouté rose still reads as fresh in a modern room where a Victorian chromolithograph looks fussy.
The plates we carry
China Rose (Rosa indica). The Bengal rose whose repeat-flowering genes created almost every modern garden rose. Pink, loose, unmistakably Redouté. See it here.
Rosa gallica — Velvet Purple. A deep crimson-purple heritage rose, the darkest plate in the book and the one that anchors a gallery wall.
From Les Liliacées: the Turban Lily and the Star of Bethlehem, from Redouté’s earlier, larger project on lilies — rarer in print than the roses and more architectural.
Gloriosa superba and Star-Glory Morning Glory round out the group, the second by his brother Henri-Joseph, who worked in the same studio and the same technique.
How we reproduce them
Each print starts as an open-access museum scan of an original plate (Cleveland Museum of Art, The Met). We remove scanner edges, correct the paper tone so it reads as warm cream rather than yellow, and add a soft off-white border. Prints are made to order in the USA on 189 gsm archival matte paper with pigment inks, in four standard sizes from 12×18 to 24×36.
Styling notes
Botanicals are vertical and look best in sets: three Redouté roses in matching thin gold or natural wood frames is the classic arrangement. For a darker, moodier wall, pair a rose with one of our black-ground pieces by Barbara Regina Dietzsch or Mary Delany.