Les Liliacées was LIMITED TO 280 COPIES ISSUED IN 80 PARTS BETWEEN 1802 AND 1816.

Les Liliacées was the first of Redouté’s three great collections of botanical prints, preceding his Les Roses and Choix des plus belles fleurs. He had come to the attention of Empress Josephine through his contributions to Ventenat’s Jardin de la Malmaison (1803-04) and indeed it was for her that he produced some of his best work.

Many of the flowers depicted in Les Liliacées were drawn at Malmaison, and he named a rare specimen after the empress, Amaryllis josephinae, illustrating its luscious beauty here as the sole double-page plate. Redouté combined his brilliant artistic skills with technical mastery to bring botanical illustration to a level never achieved before or since. He adopted the painstaking technique of applying all the colors to a single stipple-engraved plate, thus requiring re-inking after each impression. This method was ideally suited to the subtle expression of tone and contour but had not been previously applied to the depiction of flowers. The great beauty of his work has somewhat overshadowed his scientific contribution, but for each lily Redouté gives the history, nomenclature, plate description, and observations. His work on lilies was particularly useful in providing detailed images of a fragile plant impossible to preserve as a dried specimen.

Les Liliacées REPRESENTS THE PEAK OF REDOUTÉ'S ART. It is his largest work; he describes, sometimes for the first time, specimens of the lily family; and it contains the most extensive achievement of Redouté in stipple engraving, a technique he pioneered in France.

REDOUTÉ'S MASTERLY USE OF COLORED STIPPLE ENGRAVING GREATLY CONTRIBUTED TO THE ARTISTIC AND ACCURATE RENDERING OF FLOWERS. He learnt the technique from Francesco Bartolozzi while visiting England with L'Héritier de Brutelle and brought it back to France.

This technique, which had never been employed on flowers in England, allowed for a finesse of line and color that could not be achieved with classic engraving and hand coloring.

The plates of Les Liliacées were then enhanced with colors applied by hand.

The title Les Liliacées is modest, as the work encompasses a wide variety of flowers including irises, orchids, amaryllis, agaves, etc.

"The highest peak of Redouté's artistic and botanical achievement... Among the most important monuments of botanical illustration ever to be published" (Stafleu, in Redoutéana).

A journalist and friend, Jules Janin, praised the flower painter by writing after Redouté’s death: "This dazzling and elegant family of Liliaceae, with such a difficult genealogy, these diverse races that blend and merge so well that it took a genius to describe them..." (Léger, Redouté et son Temps, 1945, p. 111).

The sumptuous illustration comprises 486 STIPPLE-ENGRAVINGS, PRINTED IN COLOR AND FINISHED BY HAND by Bessin, Chapuy, and other artists after Redouté.

A PRECIOUS COPY UNIFORMLY BOUND AT THE TIME.