The Country Flowers of a Victorian Lady.

UK,slim rectangular 8vo HB+dw/dj,illustrated,1st edn. [Complete number line 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2.] FINE+/FINE. Virtually as new - certainly of gift quality! No owner inscrptn and no price-clip to dw/dj - absence of publisher's price to dw/dj's inner flaps or elsewhwere. Bright,crisp,clean,matt,colour pictorial artwork,by Fanny Robinson, illustrated dw/dj,with black+brown lettering; with negligible shelf-wear and creasing to edges and corners - no nicks or tears present.Top+fore -edges bright and clean; contents bright,tight,clean - pristine - no dog-ear reading creases to any pages' corners,would appear unread - apart from my own collation.Publisher's bright,crisp,clean,sharp-cornered, original plain cream cloth boards with bright,crisp, blocked gilt letters to spine/backstrip and immaculate illustrated endpapers.UK,8vo HB+dw/dj,1st edn,6- 96pp [paginated] includes an introduction and commentaries by Gill Saunders (Curator,Dept of Prints, Drawings and Paintings,Victoria and Albert Museum, London.),full-page,colour flora plates with illuminated text/captions,an index,and a bibliography+ acknowledgements; plus [unpaginated] colour vignetted half-title page with full-page,full-colour frntis to it's verso,title page,and colour vignetted contents list/table.
In 1977 'The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady' by Edith Holden was a world-wide publishing sensation, and it was thought that this naturalist's collection of paintings,drawings,musings and poetic extracts was a discovery the quality of which would never be matched.
Recently,however,an exquisite volume of Victorian flower paintings has come to light in Denmark,the treasured heirloom of the descendants of Fanny Robinson,a talented amateur artist who is known to have been painting in Norfolk in the 1840's.
Her "Book of Memory",as she called it,combines evocative poetry - including extracts from Keats and Shakespeare - with fine illumination and,most startling of all,exquisite watercolour studies that are both botanically accurate and a perfect example of a high Victorian style of floral illustration.
The poetical extracts encourage the reader to reflect upon such universals as nature,beauty,truth and hope. The illustrated flower groupings subtly reflect the mood of the poetry but have additional and intriguing symbolic meanings that are fascinatingly explained in the commentary by Gill Saunders,a senior curator in the Dept of Prints,Drawings and Paintings at the V& A museum.
With over forty full-page colour plates and more than a hundred full-colour details,'The Country Flowers of a Victorian Lady' takes the reader on a delightful journey into Fanny Robinson's leisured and cultivated world of flower,pen and brush.
Relatively little is known of the life and work of the exceptional amateur artist who,in the 1840'a,created the exquisite flower paintings that are here reproduced for the first time. Born in 1802,she was of a genteel family and accordingly eductated in art,botany,and the rich and complex symbolism of the Language of Flowers.Of her early life and marriage to William Hubbard Burrell we may only speculate on the basis of the sentiments expressed in her "Book of Memory",the private album of flower paintings and poetry that is her lasting legacy.When Fanny died in 1872,she was neither rich nor famous,but her delightful watercolour studies are an enduring floral tribute that will be enjoyed by future generations for years to come.
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