French Mercury, A Curious Herbal, Plate 162

Blackwell produced A Curious Herbal between 1737 and 1739 under circumstances that were themselves remarkable: she undertook the project specifically to raise funds to free her husband Alexander Blackwell from a debtors' prison in London. Working from the Chelsea Physic Garden, she drew, engraved, and hand-colored all five hundred plates herself: a feat of sustained labor that had no real precedent among women publishers of the era. Plate 162, depicting Mercurialis annua, was among the medicinal plants included for its established role in the materia medica of the period; the plant was prescribed as a purgative and emmenagogue. The herbal was endorsed by the College of Physicians and dedicated to the Society of Apothecaries, lending it institutional authority that helped it sell across Britain and Europe. Blackwell's plates occupy a transitional place in the history of botanical art, sitting between the decorative Baroque herbals of the previous century and the rigorously systematic linnaean illustration that would follow; they are scientific documents that nonetheless carry the warmth of direct observation.