In 1771 William Curtis wrote and published Instructions for collecting and preserving insects, particularly moths and butterflies. Curtis also translated and illustrated an entomology book by Linnaeus, the great Swedish botanist who established 'bionomial nomenclature' (the two-name system for naming all biological organisms). Curtis then studied botany (plants). In 1773 William Curtis was appointed Praefectus Hortis (garden superintendent and botanical demonstrator to the Society of Apothecaries) at Chelsea Physic Garden. Two years later he began his most ambitious project - the publication of descriptions and life-size hand-coloured illustrations of London flora. Curtis resigned from his position at the Physic Garden in 1777, to do his botanical publication, and to establish his own botanic garden, which he achieved at Lambeth Marsh in Brompton, London.
Curtis consulted other naturalists, and collected and propagated plants from a number of sources, including Kew Gardens and Sir Joseph Banks. The first year he acquired 6,000 different botanical species. Following his apothecary training, he divided them into medicinal, culinary, agricultural, poisonous, British and ornamental plants. For an annual subscription of one guinea anyone could visit his botanic garden and lectures he gave there. For two guineas each year, plants and seeds were available.
From 1777 to 1798 William Curtis published six volumes of Flora Londinensis: or Plates and Descriptions of such plants as grow wild in the Environs of London. After ten years William Curtis was almost bankrupt - despite widespread praise, and financial assistance from Lord Bute (who also paid for the laying-out of Kew Gardens).
As plant collectors brought specimens back to London from around the world, people were more interested in exotic plants. In 1787 Curtis began publishing small hand-coloured engravings for his Botanical Magazine. Engravings were printed from copperplates onto hand-made paper with each print hand-colored with natural ochres. Selling over 3,000 of each group of illustrations issued in parts, it subsidised the large Flora Londinensis - until Curtis could no longer continue. William Curtis worked at his botanic garden until he died in 1799 aged 53. His Botanical Magazine is now The Kew Magazine. Paper is made by machines. Copperplate engravings changed to steel-engraved plates (with each print coloured by hand), then hand-coloured lithographic plates, then colour-printed lithographs - as populations have grown and technology has developed.
Curtis's Flora Londinensis was fully published between 1817 and 1828 by botanical artist, George Graves F.L.S. (1784-1839), and Glasgow University Professor of Botany for 20 years, William Jackson Hooker (1785-1865), who was the first director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in 1841, after they were placed under state ownership as a botanic garden. Using the engraved plates William Curtis had commissioned for his Flora Londinensis, Graves and Hooker commissioned new full-size plates for illustrations that William Curtis had reduced in size due to his financial constraints.
Antique prints are exquisite artwork, hundreds of years old...far better than scanned images! Examples of Flora Londinensis are towards the end of Antique Prints >Botany..>Curtis.botanical,flowers