Allen, John Fisk

Victoria Regia; or the Great Water Lily of America.  Boston: printed for the author by Dutton and Wentworth, 1854



Folio (27  1/4  x 21  1/4  in.; 693 x 540 mm).  6 superb chromolithographed plates by William Sharp, printed by Sharp & Sons, Dorchester, Mass., each plate with two minute corner registration pin-holes; some light foxing and soiling in margins of frontispiece, occasional very light soiling in margins of other plates.  Modern half green morocco, front cover of original printed wrapper laid down.

Great Flower Books 69; Hofer Bequest 72; Hunt, Printmaking in the Service of Botany 56;  Nissen, BBI 16; Reese, American Color Plate Books 19   

Victoria Regia; or the Great Water Lily of America. Boston: printed for the author by Dutton and Wentworth, 1854 Folio (27 1/4 x 21 1/4 in.; 693 x 540 mm). 6 superb chromolithographed plates by William Sharp, printed by Sharp & Sons, Dorchester, Mass., each plate with two minute corner registration pin-holes; some light foxing and soiling in margins of frontispiece, occasional very light soiling in margins of other plates. Modern half green morocco, front cover of original printed wrapper laid down.
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First edition. A nineteenth-century botanical masterpiece of striking beauty and "among the most successful examples of early chromolithography" (Reese).  William Sharp, who emigrated to Boston from England, was America's first substantial chromolithographer.  "In the large water lily plates of Victoria Regia, Sharp printed colors with a delicacy of execution and technical brilliance never before achieved in the United States" (Reese).

The Victoria regia was discovered on the Amazon in the 1830s and was first brought to bloom in England by the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth in 1849.  John Fiske Allen's lily, which he grew in Salem, Massachusetts and which is the basis for these plates, was given to him by Caleb Cope, president of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and the dedicatee of this work.  The text and plates are based on an earlier English work by Walter Fitch (1851).