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for Pierre Joseph Redouté
Pierre Joseph Redouté
French, 1759 - 1840
French illustrator of Flemish birth. His great-grandfather, grandfather, father and two brothers all earned their living as artists. His father, Charles-Joseph Redouté (1715–76), worked as an interior decorator at the Abbey of St Hubert in the Ardennes and for wealthy Luxembourg clients. His elder brother, Antoine-Ferdinand Redouté (1756–1805), became an interior decorator and designer of stage scenery in Paris. In lasting achievement, however, Pierre-Joseph Redouté was the most distinguished. He worked with great industry and skill during a period in France particularly favourable for the publication of sumptuous and important botanical books. The engraved botanical plates, often coloured, in such books displayed his mastery of plant illustration and stipple engraving. He published in all about 2100 plates, distinguished for their elegance and accuracy, and portrayed at least 1800 species, as well as garden forms.
After basic training as a painter by his father, Redouté left home at the age of 13, studied painting in Liège and wandered as an itinerant portrait painter and interior decorator in Luxembourg, Flanders [now Belgium] and the Netherlands. There he admired the flower-pieces of such artists as Jan van Huysum and Rachel Ruysch, and from them obviously learnt to portray individual flowers with grace and precision , which was what his later patrons demanded for scientific purposes, rather than elaborate flower-pieces intended purely for aesthetic pleasure.
In 1782 Redouté moved to Paris to help his elder brother Antoine-Ferdinand, by then a successful designer of stage scenery. Here he also learnt the art of engraving and spent his leisure painting flowers in the royal botanical garden, the Jardin du Roi. Engravings of his illustrations brought him to the attention of the Dutch artist Gerard van Spaendonck and the magistrate, bibliophile and botanist Charles-Louis L’Héritier de Brutelle (1746–1800), both of whom were very influential for his career. L’Héritier instructed him in botanical detail, employed him as a botanical artist and in 1787 invited him to visit England, where he illustrated new plants and became acquainted with the technique of stipple engraving.
Back in France Redouté continued to draw plants for L’Héritier and in 1793, with his brother Henri-Joseph (see below), was commissioned to produce work for the royal collection of paintings on vellum, Collection des vélins. Although Redouté was appointed draughtsman to the cabinet of Marie-Antoinette in 1786, he and Henri-Joseph continued to portray plants during the French Revolution in 1789. Soon he began to provide illustrations for important botanical works, all published in Paris, such as René-Louiche Desfontaines’s Flora Atlantica (1798–1800), Etienne-Pierre Ventenat’s Description des plantes nouvelles (1800–02) and André Michaux’s Histoire des Chênes de l’Amérique. However, his lasting renown has come from major works with illustrations manifesting his superb mastery of perspective, such as Plantarum historia succulentarum (1798–1837) by Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle and Les Liliacées (1802–16) by de Candolle, François de la Roche and Alire Raffeueau-Delile.
The Empress Josephine Bonaparte, a lover of art, flowers and gardens, was also a patron of Redouté, and for her he produced two costly and beautiful works illustrating little-known plants grown in her two gardens, Jardin de la Malmaison (Paris, 1803–5), with text by E.-P. Ventenat, and its continuation Description des plantes rares cultivées à Malmaison et à Navarre (Paris, 1812–17), with text by Aimé-Jacques A. Bonpland. Under Josephine’s auspices Redouté began to paint roses, which resulted in his best-known work, Les Roses (Paris, 1817–24), with text by Claude-Antoine Thory, from which individual plates have often been reproduced.
After Josephine’s death Redouté’s income fell but not his expenditure, for which he borrowed money he could never repay, even though he had become a Maître du Dessin in the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris in 1822 and a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1825. His financial troubles led him to publish selections of plates with aesthetic appeal, such as Album de Redouté (1824) and Choix des plus belles fleurs (1827–33), both published in Paris, but they failed to mend his fortunes. On 19 June 1840 he had begun to paint a lily when he received the devastating news that the French government would not pay for an ambitious proposed painting; he suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and died next day.
His younger brother, Henri-Joseph Redouté (1766–1852), was a skilled zoological draughtsman who accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte on his military expedition to Egypt in 1798 as a natural history artist, recording particular landscapes and Nile fishes. He later contributed many zoological and botanical plates to the Description d’Egypte (Paris, 1809–25), as well as plates to botanical books.
William T. Stearn. "Redouté, Pierre-Joseph." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T071077 (accessed March 7, 2012)
Person TypeIndividual
French, born Flemish, 1722-1776
