The Oak Spring Garden Library: Volume III, An Oak Spring Flora (Oak Spring Garden Foundation Series) (Vol 3)

Category: Book

Used starting at $50.00

New starting at $64.00

Buy it

Product Description

This authoritative and magnificently illustrated presentation of the art of flower depiction in the West is the third volume in a series of catalogues that describe the rare in some cases unique books, manuscripts, and other works of art conserved at Oak Spring Garden Library, Upperville, Virginia, a collection formed over many years by Rachel Lambert Mellon. The author, Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, has selected more than one hundred items from Oak Spring's extensive holdings, which include superb manuscript florilegia, botanical prints, books of instruction of every kind, still-life and vanitas paintings, and various ornamental ceramics and textiles. Among them are examples by some of the greatest names ever to have worked in either scientific or decorative botanical art Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, Georg Dionysius Ehret, Nicolas Robert, and Pierre Joseph Redoute.

An Oak Spring Flora is thematically organized, with topics ranging from Tulipomania and women artists to Dutch and Flemish painting and the search for exotics in remote lands. In her introductions the author provides the personal and contextual backgrounds that are essential for a real understanding and appreciation of floral illustration past and present. The sheer beauty as well as extraordinary skills encountered in, for example, manuscript florilegia by Jacob Marrel and Maria Sibylla Merian, hand-colored books by Pierre Vallet and G. B. Ferrari, and flower studies by John Constable and others, are testament to the high status accorded floral illustration over the centuries.

The latest addition to the Oak Spring Garden Library series will be of great interest to collectors of rare books and fine-art historians as well as to botanists, garden historians, and gardeners in general.

1997, 504 pages. 9-5/8 x 11-1/4 inches, including 200 illustrations, over 157 of them in color.

Product Details

Customer Reviews

Review by Charles M. Marsteller, 2010-04-25

Great care was taken by the author and the publishers--and by their sponsor, Oak Spring Foundation--to publish this wonderful partial inventory of the great books of botanic illustration in the Library at Oak Spring, an estate that was gifted to posterity by Rachel Lambert Mellon.

This review of the extraordinary Oak Spring Library of original florilegium (books on flowers by the greatest botanic illustrators of history) is done magnificently using fine papers and inks. Thus the production of this book on books is carefully and thoughtfully done.

The book reviews are well written and thorough, and the Reader will be pleased to find excellent reproductions of select prints from these important books in color.

This reader, knowledgeable on this subject, saw reproductions in this book that are from books he has only read about but not seen. This was a most pleasant surprise, and for this, we are grateful.

Clearly, Rachel Lambert Mellon has assembled a magnificent legacy--obtaining what I thought were the unobtainable in the botanic literature.

This book is a testament and is a must have for those who are assembling their own library.

By combining this book with the fine Angelica Taschen publication, THE GARDEN OF EDEN--the inventory of the botanic collection in the Austrian National Library--the collector of botanic illustration will have an excellent survey of the primary sources in this field. I should note that the Garden of Eden is by the noted Professor Doctor H.Walter Lack of Berlin.