Viridarium: Coloured Plates of Greenhouse Plants

Lovely copy of this infamous and rare botanical by a woman artist.

Henrietta Maria Moriarty turned to botanical illustration to support her four children after being left in debt by her no-good, late husband in 1804.

Complete with all 50 hand-coloured copperplate engravings, dedication to Dowager Lady de Clifford, preface, list of subscribers, index.

While Moriarty claims to have "delineated" the plants, the "plates are in almost every case adapted with slight alteration and no acknowledgement from Curtis' Botanical Magazine" (James Briteen, Journal of Botany, 1917.)

The list of 174 subscribers includes many aristocrats, ladies and Army officers, perhaps introduced by the dedicatee, Sophia Southwell, Lady de Clifford (1743-1828), who was a keen amateur gardener and botanical artist herself. She collected many rare and exotic plants at her glasshouses in Kings Weston, Nyn Park and Dudley Grove.

Mrs. Henrietta Maria Moriarty (1781-1842), widow of Col. Matthew Moriarty, turned to writing and book illustration to support her four fatherless children. Having exhausted her connections in the aristocratic and military worlds for subscriptions for her botanical effort in 1806, she started to write gossipy, self-autobiographical novels. Her first, Brighton in an Uproar, 1811, brought her threats of prosecution by a certain baronet "with whom she had been intimate." Her second, Crim. Con, short for Criminal Conversaion or adultery, gained poor reviews in 1812, and her last, The Hero of Salamanca, 1813, was criticized for its endless plagiarized padding. Even with her late husband's military pension of 80 pounds per annum, it seems her desperate attempts to clear his debts failed. In December 1813, she is listed in the London Gazette as a "boarding-house-keeper" confined for debt in King's Bench prison. Her tragic decline continued, and in 1841, she was listed as a ward of Kensington Union Workhouse before dying in 1842 at age 59.

Recently rebound in quarter red morocco with gilt title on spine, pink marbled boards, new endpapers with old child's drawing pasted in, all edges uncut, 50 botanical plates with fresh hand-colour, light spotting and browning, tissue guards.