A collection of roses from nature.

First edition of the first book devoted to roses; a fine copy with noble provenance.

Mary Lawrance (fl. 1794-1830), was a noted flower-painter and teacher of painting, who exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1795, and this work represents a breakthrough in the depiction of the rose in all its complexity.

Preceding Redouté's more famous work by some twenty years, Mary Lawrance's Collection of Roses from Nature drew on the new found popularity of roses as an element in English gardens. Less delicate in drawing and coloring than Redouté's Les Roses, Lawrance's roses have about them a charm and prettiness that one associates with English artists of the period.

The pioneering nature of the work means that there are inevitable infelicities in some of the plates, but as Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi writes 'it cannot have been a simple task to present this flower for the first time in these ninety folio plates'. She notes that the frontispiece, a garland of roses, 'can certainly be counted among the most charming in botanical illustration' (An Oak Spring Flora, p.300). The work was published in thirty parts, beginning in 1796.