Like many rose aficionados, I love – and often refer to - my well-worn, dog-eared copy of Les Roses; my current version published by The Wellfleet Press in 1990.  While usable, my copy doesn’t even come close to an original, and I should know.  I’ve been able to peruse one of the original copies of Redouté’s seminal work here in the Huntington Library.  Although not one of the large folio editions, the Huntington’s copy has acquainted me with the supreme artistry of this phenomenal work. Availability and price of course prevent me – as most of us -- from owning an original, but now thanks to the Oakland, CA.-based company, Octavo, anyone with an up-to-date computer and a CD-ROM reader can have the next best thing, right on their home monitor (click on the above image to link to their site's Les Roses page). 

Scanned from the Lessing J. Rosenwald copy in the United States Library of Congress, each digital image is 137.3 megabytes with a resolution of 287.5 PPI relative to the original.  The 565 images in this edition are JPEG-compressed (.jpg) and presented at 144 PPI for viewing at a maximum of 200%.  This edition copies the originals faithfully; reproducing all 565 images in 886 pages.  No light reading here!

Redouté published the three volumes of Les Roses in 30 parts, from 1817 to 1824.  The Rosenwald copy has a note by Redoutè himself stating that this volume is the first of five special copies issued in large folio format with plates in a double sequence.  Each plate is first presented in black and white on tan-colored paper and followed by a colored plate on white paper.  Octavo presents the book in an open-spread format, just like any book open on your desk.

With an extensive commentary by Sandra Raphael, who served as Librarian and Archivist at the Linnaean Society and senior editor for A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, 1972 and contributor to The Oxford Companion to Gardens, 1986 (still an essential component of my library).   Raphael also collaborated with Wilfred Blunt on The Illustrated Herbal, 1994 and authored An Oak Spring Sylva, 1989 and An Oak Spring Pomona, 1990.  Raphael’s commentary is bright and informative, outlining Redoutè’s carrier from his birth - on July 10, 1759 in the town of Saint-Hubert near Liege in Luxembourg, now Belgium - to his apprenticeship under the Dutch artist Gerard van Spaëndonck (1746-1822) and the botanist Charles Louis L’Hèritier de Brutelle (1746-1800).  Redoutè maintained that L’Hèritier taught him the need for botanical accuracy in his paintings.  While not all of the 170 roses illustrated by Redoutè were painted from the Empress Josephine’s garden at Malmasion, as the legend contends, Redoutè and Thory did select the roses from a number of sources and all were painted and described from live material.  Pierre-Joseph Redoutè served as a court painter to the pre-Revolution Bourbon Queen Marie Antoinette and the post-Revolution Empress Josèphine Bonaparte; out-surviving his botanical mentor, L’Hèritier, who fell victim to The Terror.  Redoutè survived the French Revolution and Napoleon and ended his days teaching painting to wealthy young ladies.  At the ripe age of 81, he died of a sudden heart attack while painting a lily.

This Octavo edition presents the French text translated into English by Ian Jackson for Octavo.  The complete original text, written by Claude-Antoine Thory, has never been available in English before this edition.  For true bibliophiles, there is a section on binding and collation which covers issues like missing and duplicated pages.  This CD-ROM is a serious examination of the complete original as it is.  Every page, binding, and covers - whether printed or not - has been scanned at high resolution.  Few of us will ever have the opportunity to get this close to such a fine example of one of the classics in botanical illustration as this CD-ROM of Les Roses.

Redoutè is the acknowledged master of botanical illustration.  Each of his plates for this work was first sketched in light pencil, and then he used translucent watercolors to carefully build up each image’s verisimilitude.  Redoutè not only painted the original images but he taught himself the art of stipple-engraving and printing, so that he could oversee the production of his work.  Each plate from this edition of Les Roses stands out from the page as fresh and lively as the day it was printed.

Every rosarian has a favorite Redoutè rose painting:  mine has long been and remains his ‘Rosa Noisettiana, Rosier de Philippe Noisette’ (View (Plate) 317 in this edition – see the Quicktime slideshow by clicking on the rose image below - click here or on the above CD image for the photo gallery).  That the artist could capture such beauty, and the essence of “rosiness,” from a single flowering stem is almost unbelievable, but there it is for all to see.  Now multiply that to the complete work.  To think that he painted 170 images from life for these volumes is truly mind-boggling!  I know how difficult it was to photograph 100 different roses in a single Spring for each one of my own books.  Imagine drawing and painting nearly double that!

An artist etched each image onto a copper plate, and then another hand-colored it for printing, then cleaned, recolored, and printed it once more.  Each individual plate was then retouched by hand.  This accounts for slight differences in color between existing copies, but it is astounding just how uniform they all are.  It is a testament to the dedication to detail the artist and his printers maintained.  There is no doubt this was one of the most costly and time-consuming ways to produce a book, but it also accounts for the superior quality and longevity of the volumes.

Redoutè had a way with watercolor that particularly captured the essence of pink roses.  His pinks have a translucent quality which gives a special life to his images, as in Rosa centifolia Bullata (View 40).  Yellows come through crisp and clean such as Rosa Bererifolia (View 25) - now R. persica - with its unrose-like simple leaves and yellow petals with red-brown eyes.  Sometimes, the inks used printing red and deep pink roses lose this wonderful translucent effect, but even Rosa Indica (View 58), the single-flowered red China, is yet today easily identifiable in our modern gardens.  To truly see the magnificent quality of his paintings, one need only examine his Rosa Damascena Variegata (View 188) - our ‘York and Lancaster’ rose - to see the artist’s light, careful touch with the brush.

Octavo Editions are fully compatible with WindowsTM, MacintoshTM, and UNIXTM operating systems. On my iMac computer screen , the images open reasonably quickly, are very crisp and startlingly beautiful; even when enlarged to 200%.  Having more recent hardware does help a great deal, but I have to say that, even on my work PC with its sadly outdated drives and memory capabilities – not to mention a much smaller monitor -  the images still come up fine and are quite acceptable in clarity and viewability.  This CD-ROM edition allows quick searches using the standard Adobe Reader control bars across the viewscreen’s top and bottom.  Accessing different sections is as easy as clicking on the contents page’s chapter listings.  Just click on the view you want to open and there it is [I do recommend that, when viewing an enlarged page, it seems to work better to scroll using the ‘up’ and ‘down’ arrows on the right-hand side rather than the vertical scrollbar, which tends to get very jumpy and offers less control].

When I first received this CD-ROM, I did have a bit of difficulty getting the huge files to open (on my old work PC).  But once I made sure the computer had the latest version of Adobe’s free Reader (6.0 at the time, now they’re at issue 7.0), I had no trouble accessing all the great features of this glorious publication.  So do make certain you’re keeping up with Adobe’s latest reader releases (they’re always free), and whatever you can do to maximize your computer’s memory and drive (speed) capacity will help; though again, my work PC has very little of either and it works just fine for me.  One hint I discovered the hard way is to open your Adobe Reader first (rather than the CD directly).  Then use the Reader’s pulldown menus to Open the CD from within Adobe itself.  This seems to prevent the memory lock-ups I experienced before making this discovery.

Some historians contend that the modern era began around 1450 CE, precisely at the point of Guttenberg’s Bible printing thanks to the invention of movable type.  Mass printing was an epochal event in our history that allowed the dissemination of knowledge on a scale never before experienced.  One could argue just as effectively that the invention of the personal computer and the worldwide web are equally landmark steps for humankind.

Of course, both landmarks depend completely on the quality of information disseminated, but there’s no question in that regard here.  Octavo and the Library of Congress have made one of the most important and beautiful rose books available to nearly anyone with a computer.  For the first time, one need not be a multi-millionaire or a scholar with antique language skills and access to travel and/or a world-class research library to study Redoutè’s paintings and Thory’s text.

Oh, how the 20th Century’s old rose pioneers, like Ethelyn Keyes, Edward Bunyard, Nancy Steen, and Graham Stuart Thomas, would have loved and could have made use of this CD-ROM!

 

It bears mentioning that Octavo has also created a scholar-level version of the complete volumes of Les Roses (unconnected with this review).  Called the Research Facsimile series, the 12 CD set of Redoutè’s classic bears the highest scrutiny using ultra-detailed image mapping and recreation, allowing the user to delve down to the most minute levels of paper textures, printing impressions, inks, pigments, threads, and glue; not to mention the drawn and painted images themselves. 

Designed specifically for professional and institutional use, this complete set is priced at $950.00US – not for the budget-bound, clearly.  However, the single CD-ROM Octavo Edition is an exemplary tool for the average roselover’s edification, and even holds up to all but the most exacting scholarly research.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of having the CD-ROM of this work is the wonderful capacity to access any part of the material any time I like.  Unlike gaining special permissions, access space, and protocols for viewing a prized library original – always with exacting restrictions – I can pop the CD-ROM into any computer I’m using, and I have complete use of the volume for as long as I need or like.

All in all, I find the Octavo Edition of Redoutè’s Les Roses to be an essential and joyous tool to have the privilege of using.  I’m thrilled to have it as a component of my rose library, and I’m certain you’ll feel the same way.

Les Roses
by Pierre-Joseph Redouté

Octavo Digital Rare Books
Oakland, California
CD-ROM   First Edition 2002
$50.00US
ISBN 1-891788-28-0

www.octavo.com

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