Botanical, Andrews Henry, Erica Oblique, Copperplate Engraving, 1797

Date: 1797

Artist: Andrews Henry

Size: 260 x 415mm

Condition: Very good

Technique: Copperplate Engraving

Price: $180

Description This beautiful original botanical print on thick 18th century paper. 

Biography:

Henry Charles Andrews (1794 - 1830), was an English botanist, and
an artist who illustrated plants.
He lived in Knightsbridge. He was married to the daughter of John Kennedy of Hammersmith, a nurseryman who helped Andrews to write descriptions of the plants he illustrated.
Andrews was a good and unusual botanical artist. He was not only an artist, but
also engraver,  colourist , and publisher in a time when most artists were only employed to make small drawings. The Botanist's Repository was his first publication. It was issued in London in a series of ten volumes between 1797 and 1812. It provided affordable images of plants to the growing population of amateur gardeners in Britain. The Kew publication, Curtis's Botanical Magazine, wrote that Andrews work was very accurate. Andrews' images have a more artistic appeal compared to the publications of his rival, which were focused more on scientific descriptions.The drawings for these, which are careful and artistic, were executed by Andrews; but the letterpress accompanying them was in many instances by other hands; that of the ‘Heaths’ was by James Wheeler, then curator of the Chelsea Botanic Gardens, while in the first five volumes of the ‘Repository’ he was ‘assisted by gardeners and cultivators,’ and in the sixth ‘by a botanist whose opinions were diametrically opposed to those of the former.’ In consequence of this, Andrews tells us in the preface to his ‘Geraniums,’ that he thought it ‘much better to try his own strength, however weak, than to remain tottering between the support of two such unequal crutches.’ Andrews does not seem to have contributed to contemporary periodical literature. Ventenat named a genus Andreusia after him, which is synonymous with Myoporum.