A Curious Herbal, Plate 158: Wild Iris

Blackwell engraved and colored A Curious Herbal between 1737 and 1739 under circumstances that were both professionally remarkable and personally desperate; her husband Alexander Blackwell had been imprisoned for debt, and Elizabeth undertook the entire project (drawing from life at the Chelsea Physic Garden, engraving the copper plates herself, and overseeing hand-coloring) to earn enough to secure his release. Plate 158, cataloguing the Iris sylvestris alongside related sword-leaved species, appears in the first volume and reflects the systematic Linnaean impulse beginning to reshape European natural history in the 1730s. The work was endorsed by the College of Physicians and became a standard apothecary reference, placing Blackwell in the company of such botanical illustration predecessors as Maria Sibylla Merian, though Blackwell operated with fewer resources and under far greater duress. Today the Curious Herbal is held in collections including the British Library and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Blackwell is recognized as one of the earliest women to produce and publish a major work of scientific illustration entirely under her own authorship and craft.