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Item #42675 Canadian Wild Flowers. Painted and Lithographed by Agnes Fitzgibbon With Botanical Descriptions By C.P.Traill. Agnes FITZGIBBON, Catherine Parr TRAILL.
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Canadian Wild Flowers. Painted and Lithographed by Agnes Fitzgibbon With Botanical Descriptions By C.P.Traill
Canadian Wild Flowers. Painted and Lithographed by Agnes Fitzgibbon With Botanical Descriptions By C.P.Traill
Canadian Wild Flowers. Painted and Lithographed by Agnes Fitzgibbon With Botanical Descriptions By C.P.Traill

Canadian Wild Flowers. Painted and Lithographed by Agnes Fitzgibbon With Botanical Descriptions By C.P.Traill

Montreal: John Lovell, 1869. Folio. (14 1/4 x 10 1/2 inches). 86pp. Chromolithographed title and 10 lithographed plates, printed in colour and finished by hand.

Original green cloth, front board tooled and lettered gilt, back board stamped in blind, brown-coated endpapers, all edges gilt

The first large-scale colour plate botanical book entirely produced in Canada.

Canadian Wild Flowers is one of the first botanical works of its kind published in Canada. It brings together the expertise of Catherine Parr Traill, the English-Canadian naturalist, and her niece Agnes Fitzgibbon, a prolific natural history artist. Their collaboration produced this landmark work with a conservationist aim to "foster a love for the native plants of Canada" and to turn readers' attention to "the floral beauty that destined sooner or later to be swept away, as the onward march of civilization clears away the primeval forest" (p.6). A pioneer of Canada's natural history and a talented writer, Traill provided detailed descriptions that address the scientific as well as the aesthetic. For each type of plant, Traill renders in writing its structural parts and habits as well as its beauty and ornamental qualities. Her frequent inclusion of verses by Longfellow, Milton, Shakespeare and others gives the text an ode-like quality that celebrates the country's native flora, some of which were already endangered in her time. From the Preface and throughout the work, Traill evokes the Romantic sentiment which suggests that with civilization comes the destruction of nature. Traill writes, "A time will come when these rare productions of our soil will disappear from among us, and can be found only on those waste and desolate places where the foot of civilized man can hardly penetrate" (p.61). With Traill observing that the plants yearly disappeared, Fitzgibbon's illustrations are thus all the more pertinent for recording and preserving the flowers' likenesses. For the first edition, Fitzgibbon drew the title and the ten floral images on the same borrowed lithographic stone and they were printed by a Toronto firm William Chewett. "At home through much of 1867-1868, she painted five thousand sheets in sixteen opaque colours, aided by her three daughters and two young women from a Toronto painting school for ladies operated by the wife of artist Hoppner Meyer" (Globe). With the first edition's success and increasing subscribers, Fitzgibbon created eleven new stones for this second edition at a chromolithographers' in Montreal, painting 5,500 more sheets with transparent washes. The book went through four editions and stands as a remarkable example of a home-produced, large-format illustrated botanical book and one that, according to Fitzgibbon's wishes, is "entirely of Canadian production, without any foreign aid" (p.5).

Lande 2266; Nissen BBI 980; Dionne 111, 1360; Alexander Globe, "The Story of Canadian Wild Flowers," McMaster University Library Digital Collections.

Item #42675

Price: $1,250.00