Giclee, Botany, Fruit, Admirable Peach, Duhamel, Aubriet, Paris,

Archival Limited Edition Giclee after an antique hand colored copper engraving after artist Claude Aubriet for Henri Louis Duhamel Du Monceau’s Traite’ des Arbres Fruitiers, published Paris, 1768

The illustration depicts a branch with two ripe peaches below a cluster of healthy green leaves; in the lower left is a half peach revealing the cling stone within and two small pink blossoms above.

Giclee Limited to 200 each image. Issued with numbered certificate.

Size of image = 24cm x 31cm  (9 1/2 x 12 1/3 inch)

Eighteenth Century Botanical Art: The 1700’s and the early 1800’s were the Golden Age of plant illustration. This was the era of Claude Aubriet, Pierre-Joseph Redoute & Pierre Jean Francois Turpin in France, Franz & Ferdinand Bauer (Matthew Flinders’ Voyage) and Georg Dionysius Ehret in England. They overshadowed all botanical painters who came before or after them with their combination of artistic vision & botanical accuracy.

Henri Louis Duhamel du Monceau (1700-1782), was a French physician, naval engineer and botanist. Today he is regarded as a "polymath", a person of wide knowledge and learning. Once he inherited his father's estate (Alexandre Duhamel, lord of Denainvilliers) he pushed his law books aside and concentrated on solving scientific problems, significantly botanical and meteorological. His contemporaries named him "one of the outstanding botanists of the 18th century" in the fields fruit, plant physiology and agriculture.

Claude Aubriet was described as “possibly the greatest natural genius of all the French botanical artists of his day” and his work was chosen to be the main contributor of Duhamel’s botanical work depicting the known varieties and new discoveries of exploration in the period.