Pierre-Joseph Redouté (Saint-Hubert 1759-1840 Paris)

Born in the Austrian Netherlands and receiving his earliest artistic education from his father, Pierre-Joseph Redouté gained experience in Paris and London, where in 1787 he worked with the naturalist Charles-Louis L’Héritier de Brutelle. Returning to Paris, Redouté was introduced at the French court and, with Gerard van Spaendonck, contributed to the annual production of the 20 watercolours on vellum made since the 17th century for the Royal Collection. While continuing to work on print designs for scholarly publications, he became in 1793 the official artist of the ‘vélins du roi’ destined for the new Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. For this collection, Redouté painted more than six hundred plates on vellum with a white background, surrounded by a gold framing line. At the summit of his career, when he enjoyed the patronage of Empress Joséphine, he participated from 1799 in the creation of the Empress’s botanical garden in Malmaison with the naturalists Étienne-Pierre Ventenat, Charles-François Brisseau de Mirbel and Jacques Goujaud, called Bonpland (see C. de Bourgoing in Le Pouvoir des fleurs. Pierre-Joseph Redouté 1759-1840, exh. cat., Paris, Musée de la Vie Romantique, 2017, p. 53).

Redouté usually chose white backgrounds for his works on vellum, favouring dark backgrounds for larger, more ambitious compositions, executed with exceptional refinement, as here. Two similar examples can be mentioned: Lamb’s ears and camellias, exhibited at the Salon of 1836, and acquired for King Louis-Philippe I (Louvre, inv. 32704; op. cit., no. 31, ill. p. 67), and a signed Bouquet of roses in the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Besançon (inv. D.2221; op. cit., no. 11, ill. p. 14), which, like the present drawing, was probably made for the open market.