Trew, Christoph Jakob

FIRST EDITION, issue without sectional titles, folio (513 x 355mm.), engraved title heightened in red and gold, 3 fine mezzotint portraits of Trew, Johann Jacob Haid and Georg Dionysius Ehret, 100 fine hand-coloured engraved plates after G.D. Ehret by J.J. Haid and J.E. Haid, each with the first word of the caption heightened in gilt, contemporary mottled calf gilt, covers with gilt borders composed of foliate and animal motifs, spine gilt in eight compartments with floral motifs, red morocco letting-piece

Hjalmar Hartmann (1870–1945, horticulturist and seed manufacturer), bookplate

A Cleveland Herbal 429; Dunthorne 309; Great Flower Books, p.144; Hunt 539; Nissen BBI 1997; Stafleu TL2 15.131

A FINE COPY of Trew and Ehret's celebrated collaboration, magnificently coloured by hand. The Plantae selectae is considered by Nissen to be the finest botanical work ever printed in Germany. Trew, physician at Nuremberg and amateur botanist, admired the talent and skill of his younger countryman, Georg Ehret, a gardener and flower painter. This work is their major collaboration, although Ehret did contribute several drawings to Trew's Hortus nitidissimis. Ehret is one of the great painters of flowering plants in the eighteenth century and all 100 plates of the Plantae selectae were painted by him. Trew died in 1769, leaving the last three parts uncompleted. The work was finished by Benedict Christian Vogel, Professor of Botany at the University of Altdorf.