Plants Used as Food. Millet, Maize (Corn), Buckwheat, Taro, c1866

by Fitch, Walter Hood

Antique print of Sorgum, Corn, Fagopyrum and Collocasia (Sorgum vulgare, Zea Mays, Fagopyrum esculentum and Collecasia antiquorum). A beautiful botanical engraving of important food crops with details of flowers, roots, seeds.

Original hand-coloured steel engraving c1866 by James Bishop from the drawing by Walter Hood Fitch for A History of the Vegetable Kingdom, embracing the physiology of plants, with their uses to man and the lower animals, and their application in the arts, manufactures and domestic economy. by William Rhind, lecturer on Botany, Marischal College, Aberdeen. Published in London by Blackie & Son of Glasgow, Edinburgh and London.

William Rhind (1797-1874) began studying the herbal uses of botany during his medical course in Aberdeen. He pursued his interest in botany beyond his apprenticeship to an Elgin physician, during further studies in London, while he practised medicine and sold medicinal remedies in Elgin, and in Edinburgh where there was better opportunity to research and write about the other economic uses of plants.

Walter Hood Fitch (1817-1892) was one of the most prolific and skilled botanical draughtsmen of the in the mid-nineteenth century. Fitch engraved and lithographed thousands of his own botanical prints over the years, but his skill is perhaps most evident in this series of multi-layered seemingly three-dimensional compositions of groups of botanical subjects for Rhind's 'Practical Applications of Botany'.

245 x 150cm (9.5/8 x 5.7/8 inches). Faint soiling around page edge.