This time of year, we're getting pretty wistful for spring. As such, we've been looking at books on flowers and we have a lovely one to share today. Margaret Roscoe's 1829 Floral Illustrations of the Seasons is just what it sounds like: a series of botanical illustrations, each accompanied by a brief description of its classification, cultivation, and history. Prior to this work, Roscoe (née Lace) illustrated another botanical text written by her father-in-law, William Roscoe. Floral Illustrations is dedicated to William, who she describes as a generous patron of the science.
In the process of making this book, Margaret Roscoe's original illustrations needed to be reproduced in print. To accomplish this, a professional engraver named Robert Havell made aquatint plates imitating her work as closely as possible. Those plates would print black-and-white images, which were then colored by hand. The finished prints could then be bound into each copy of the book, creating a run of more or less identical works.
The color is the real reason we're mentioning this process now. There's inherent distance between whatever those original illustrations looked like and the published prints, but they were both physical mediums. But there's a new, significant layer of separation in showcasing this book now: the limitations of digital color. You can see the photos included in this post through something called the RGB color model. It's how phones and computers represent all colors, based on various combinations of red, green, and blue light. It's an impressive technology with a very nuanced output, but what it shows you is not how color works on the page.
When you look at a book (and most other things) in real life, the color tends to be subtractive: white light passes through an object and the nature of the object allows differing wavelengths to be absorbed or reflected. Those wavelengths are then translated by your eye, resulting in your own color perception. This is fundamentally how the pigment on a colored illustration works. In these photos, RGB is doing its best to represent the yellow of the crocus and the blue of the spring gentian, but it is doing so by emitting light, when the illustrations are producing that color by selectively absorbing it. As such, it doesn't actually look the same.
The colors in Floral Illustrations have remained remarkably vivid, despite being almost 200 years old. This foray into optics is all to say that if you want a reminder that spring is coming, we have you covered. We just really recommend that you come see it in person.
To see this particular piece of loveliness, come to Rauner and request Rare Book SB407 .R79 1829.
