Dwarf Rose (Rosa Pumila, Rosier d'Amour)

Redouté published Les Roses in installments between 1817 and 1824, at the height of his fame as official court botanist and painter to the Empress Joséphine at Malmaison. Though Joséphine had died in 1814, the project was deeply indebted to her legendary rose garden, which she had assembled with near-obsessive ambition, importing species from across Europe, North Africa, and the Americas. Rosa Pumila represents one of the smaller, wilder species in that collection, a counterpoint to the lavish hybrid cultivars that filled the garden's formal beds. Redouté worked from living specimens, collaborating with botanist Claude Antoine Thory, who supplied the Latin nomenclature and species notes. The plates were engraved using a stipple engraving process (thousands of fine dots rather than lines) then hand-colored under Redouté's supervision, achieving tonal gradations that conventional line engraving could not. Les Roses ran to three editions in Redouté's lifetime and remained the definitive visual reference for rose taxonomy well into the Victorian era; original folios now reside in the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Royal Horticultural Society.