GLEADALL, Eliza Eve. The Beauties of Flora with Botanic and Poetic Illustrations: Being a Selection of Flowers Drawn from Nature, Arranged Emblematically, with Directions for Colouring Them.

Drawing Lessons from the Headmistress

GLEADALL, Eliza Eve. The Beauties of Flora with Botanic and Poetic Illustrations: Being a Selection of Flowers Drawn from Nature, Arranged Emblematically, with Directions for Colouring Them. Wakefield: published by Eliza Eve Gleadall, at Heath Hall. [1834-1836].

4to. Two volumes (35 x 27cm, 37 x 27cm). Original publisher’s green cloth decorated in blind with foliate pattern, with gilt lettering in foliate border to fronts and gilt foliate corner decorations to sides, all edges gilt; pp. viii, 40; [2], iv, 72; 2 lithographed hand-coloured title-pages and 41 hand-coloured plates; lacking tissue guard for volume 1, plate 20, spines a little sunned, occasional foxing mainly to text leaves, very good; nineteenth-century bookplate of Henry Greenwood to front pastedown.

First edition of this self-published flower-drawing manual by Eliza Eve Gleadall (1806–1887), headmistress of a ladies’ seminary near Wakefield, copiously illustrated with life-size botanical plates. Rarely found complete in both volumes; only 115 copies were printed for subscribers of volume I, and probably fewer of volume II.

A striking example of the early nineteenth-century vogue for instructional flower-drawing manuals, this work is distinguished by its series of finely executed life-size plates, the categorisation of each plant by its poetic symbolism, and a text which combines literary allusion, copious verse, and sharp-eyed observation of, inter alia, the camellia, rhododendron, lady’s slipper orchid, passionflower, and waterlily.

The work is the self-published production of Eliza Eve Gleadall, headmistress of a ladies’ seminary at Heath Old Hall near Wakefield, and one of a relatively small number of women to publish botanical instructional works in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century, following predecessors such as Elizabeth Steele Perkins (1768–1852). The plates were drawn from ornamental foreign plants cultivated in the gardens of the great houses in and around Wakefield, preserving a record of species then prized by collectors and gardeners. The project attracted the support of figures at the highest levels of contemporary scientific and ecclesiastical society: Gleadall acknowledges the assistance of Samuel Curtis, proprietor of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, in the preparation of the plates, while the second volume is dedicated, by permission, to the Archbishop of York.

Beyond its artistic and educational aims, the work has acquired lasting botanical significance. Research published by the Passiflora Society International has shown that the passionflower depicted in Plate I and identified by Gleadall as Passiflora racemosa is in fact the earliest known representation of a hybrid now designated Passiflora ‘Kew Gardens’ (Passiflorunde 15[1], 2007, pp. 2–4). The plates preserve not only a record of contemporary horticultural taste but also evidence for the early cultivation of a plant whose hybrid status would not be recognised until much later.

Despite the ambition of the undertaking and the prestige it attracted, the work remained Gleadall’s sole publication. Following her marriage in 1838 to Benjamin Williamson, a Leeds widower, she relinquished the management of her seminary and did not publish further botanical illustrations.

Dunthorne 123; Great Flower Books, p. 57; Nissen BBI 715.

SKU: 2124911