Books and Manuscripts

Rosenberg, (Mary Elizabeth)
The West of England Florist's Magazine
(Bath, England), 1845. First edition. 4to. Illustrated with 18 hand-colored lithographic plates; each plate with accompanying text and tissue guard. Contemporary full red calf, stamped in blind and in gilt, rebacked, boards worn and rubbed, corners worn, boards bowed; all edges trimmed; marbled endpapers; first two blanks starting; marginal soiling to plates, offsetting to same. 

A seemingly unrecorded work by a popular English flower painter, published the same year at the artist's Museum of Flowers. Born in Bath in 1819, Mary Elizabeth Rosenberg was the daughter of the painter Thomas Elliott Rosenberg and a granddaughter of the silhouettist Charles Christian Rosenberg. In 1850 she married still-life painter William Duffield and moved to London. She exhibited frequently at the New Water Colour Society, the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of British Artists, as well as at the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World's Columbia Exposition in Chicago. Her book, The Art of Flower Painting (1856) went through several editions.

It is likely that this is the first issue of The Museum of Flowers before the title was changed. Not recorded in Plesch, De Belder Collections, BMC, or NUC. Rare.