Jane Wells Loudon (1807-1858)
from The Ladies' Flower-Garden...
Hand-colored lithographs
London: Mid 19th Century
10 x 8 inches each
$375 each

Series of botanical prints after illustrations by Jane Loudon, showing various species arranged in decorative bouquets, which was her innovation. Until Loudon, botanicals featured either a single specimen or flowers that belonged to a specific category of scientific classification. Loudon took the approach of a gardener gathering the current blooms and arranging them artistically.

Jane Webb Loudon was the wife of John Claudius Loudon, an important nineteenth-century landscape gardener and horticultural writer. Widowed early, she supported herself with popular horticultural writing and illustration, producing a series of volumes on annuals, perennials, greenhouse plants, bulbs, wildflowers and so forth.

After being orphaned at 17, Loudon met her husband when she wrote a futuristic novel set in the 22nd Century titled The Mummy and sent it off in search of a publisher under a male pseudonym. Intrigued by the book, John Loudon requested to meet the author, and they were married seven months later. Though up until that time Jane Loudon had never gardened, she worked alongside her husband on his literary projects and became a horticultural authority in her own right. Although she stopped writing novels, her gardening books did well--Instructions in Gardening for Ladies proved so popular with beginning gardeners, it sold what was then the impressive amount of 20,000 copies.

Reference:

Miller, Margo, "Blooming belles: Honoring botanical art from the hands of 18th- and 19th-century women." Boston Globe. 26 February 1998. http://www.haleysteele.com/hs_root/exhibition/wbi/blooming_belles.html (18 March 2002).