Botanical, Fern, Great Britain, Ireland, Henry Bradbury, Limited Edition, Giclee

Archival Limited Edition Giclee print on conservation cotton paper using fade resistant inks of the original Nature-Print of a Fern in Great Britainby Henry Bradbury (1829-1860) for The Ferns of Britain and Ireland, published in London, 1857

Features there separate fronds: the larger middle frond is the rear view showing detailing the stalk (rachis) with numerous tapering pinnae and numerous brown spores and the rhizome base with fine hair-like roots are evident, flanked by smaller fronds illustrating the top view. The original lead plate that bore the impression was tinted with yellow-green and sepia inks.

Issued with Limited Edition Certificate  /200

Print Size = 38.6 cm x 54.5 cm (15 1/3 x 28 inch)

Henry Riley Bradbury, The Victorian Fern Craze & Nature Printing

Henry Bradbury was a British writer on printing possibly owed to having come from a family heavily involved in this growth industry. For centuries printers had played with the idea of “Nature Printing”. Bradbury was young & ambitious living in Victorian England at a time when Fern Mania had gripped the British Public. He traveled to Vienna to see what’s new to give a commercial edge in an increasingly competitive London trade. Here he learnt an exciting new technique invented by Alois Auer- he achieved an image directly from nature using a a plate of hard metal (Steel was a new 1850s invention) and one of soft lead. Bradbury was the first to apply Auer’s nature-printing to illustrate “The Ferns of Great Britain & Ireland” in 1857. However, Bradbury developed his own modification by electroplating of the soft lead printing surface for clarity and durability. He said of his exciting process that it afforded “truthfulness unobtainable by any other known method of printing...' Unfortunately a controversy erupted after Bradbury lodged a British patent for his improvement without acknowledging Alois Auer as the Nature Printing technique inventor. Consequently this the Auer-Bradbury nature-printing technique was short-lived.