The John Golden Library: Book Illustration in the Age of Scientific Discovery

The John Golden Library: Book Illustration in the Age of Scientific Discovery

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 38. Miller, Philip | The illustrated supplement to Miller's Gardeners Dictionary, with distinguished provenance.

Miller, Philip | The illustrated supplement to Miller's Gardeners Dictionary, with distinguished provenance

Auction Closed

November 22, 05:54 PM GMT

Estimate

12,000 - 18,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

Miller, Philip

Figures of the most Beautiful, Useful, and Uncommon Plants described in the Gardeners Dictionary. London: printed for the Author, [1755‒]1760


2 volumes, folio (415 x 255mm). Dedication with engraved vignette, 300 handcolored engraved plates (2 folding) printed in black, green, or sepia, by T. Jefferys, J.S. Miller and J. Mynde after J. Bartram, G.D. Ehret, W. Houston, R. Lancake and J.S. Miller; minor marginal offsetting to vol. 1 tile, occasional light browning or offsetting to plates. Contemporary speckled calf, spine gilt in compartments with morocco lettering pieces, covers and edges ruled in gilt; extremities rubbed and chipped, neat repairs to tears on boards, joints, and corners.


First edition; the Frankland-Von Hoffmann copy.


Miller’s illustrated supplement to his overwhelmingly popular Gardeners Dictionary. While conceived as a complement to an earlier publication, Miller’s Figures of … Plants" is a sufficiently complete work and may be rated on its own merits" (Hunt). The plants illustrated were either engraved from drawings of specimens in the Chelsea Physic Garden or drawings supplied by Miller's numerous correspondents, who included John Bartram (see lot 3), the Pennsylvania naturalist (cf. plate 272), and Dr. William Houston, who travelled widely in the Americas and West Indies and bequeathed Miller his papers, drawings, and herbarium (cf. plates 44 and 182).


Miller initially intended to publish one figure of a plant for every known genus, but in his preface, he explains that the expenses of production have caused him "almost from the Beginning … to contract his Plan, and confine it to those Plants only, which are either curious in themselves, or may be useful in Trades, Medicine, &c., including the Figures of such new Plants as have not been noticed by any former Botanists." For the plants drawn from examples in the Garden, Miller employed Richard Lancake and two of the leading botanical artists and engravers of the period, Georg Dionysius Ehret and Johann Sebastian Miller. The work was published by subscription in 50 monthly parts (each part with 6 plates) between 25 March 1755 and 30 June 1760; there were later editions in 1771 and 1809.


REFERENCE:

Dunthorne 209; Great Flower Books, p.121; Henrey 1097; Nissen BBI 1378; Stafleu TL2 6059


PROVENANCE:

Frankland (bookplate) — Ladislaus von Hoffman (Christie's New York, 4 June 1997, "An Important Botanical Library, The Property of a Gentleman," lot 111) — Christie's London, 2 June 2004, lot 186 (undesignated consignor)