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 BESSA, After Pancrace
[Bouquet of flowers with Cabbage White butterfly]
[Paris] & London: Danlos ainé and Victor Delarue, [1808]. Stipple engraving, printed in colours, finished by hand, by Alexandre Chaponnier. Expertly re-backed with mulberry paper repairing a three inch tear lower right. Sheet size: 20 x 15 1/2 inches.
An extremely rare large scale print after Bessa, a contemporary of Redouté.
This `magnificent large ' print (Dunthorne) is from a work called Fleurs et Fruits gravés et coloriés sur les peintures aquarelles faites d'après nature, published in Paris in 1808, with 24 plates after Bessa. However, the book is so rare that even in 1938 Gordon Dunthorne had only been able to find five of the plates. The present print is of a red and white tulip, a blue hyacinth and two stems of multi-headed narcissus, with a Cabbage White butterfly settled on one of the broad leaves of the tulip. Here Bessa and Chaponnier have combined to produce a plate that is a match for any printed image from Redouté, and in terms of scale larger than anything he produced.
Cf. Dunthorne 31
#3803 $5,500.00  
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