P-J Turpin & P-A Poiteau
New-World Botanicals

The extraordinary copper-plate envgravings below are cut from the 1st edition of Alexander von Humbolt and Aime Bonpland's classic and extremely rare  Plantes equinoxiales, Recueilles au Mexique, dans l'ile de Cuba, dans les Provinces de Caracas, de Cumana et de Barcelone, aux Andes de Nouvelle-Granade, de Quito et du Perou, et sur les Bords du Rio-Negro, de l'Orenoque et de la Rivere des Amazones, published in Paris by F. Schoell and in Tubingen by J. G. Cotta, 1808. The plates are drawn by Pierre Jean Francois Turpin and Pierre-Antoine Poiteau, and engraved by Sellier and Bouquet.    

Wilfred Blunt describes Pierre Jean François Turpin (1775-1840) as "possibly the greatest botanical genius of all the French botanical painters of his day. The son of a poor artisan, he learned the elements of drawing in the art school of his home town, Vire.  At the age of fourteen he joined up in the batallion du Calvados, and five years later was shipped to San Domingo.  Here he had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of a young botanist named Pierre-Antoine Poiteau (1766-1854) who fired him with an enthusiam for natural history and became his lifelong friend.  After various vicissitudes, Turpin met the German naturalist and explorer von Humboldt in New York in 1801, and the following year the two men returned together to France where they were joined by Poiteau. Turpin and Poiteau collaborated in some of the most important botanical publications of the early years of the nineteenth century, notably those of von Humboldt, Bonpland and Kunth. In all these productions Turpin was the dominant force. In particular, his drawings of botanical details have rarely been surpassed."

The plates below are on sturdy wove paper.   There is light speckled  foxing in the wide margins (heavier toward the top), but the image are is generally clean with, perhaps a small blemish here and there.  The upper right corner is slightly bumped.  The plates are whole and intact, cropped in the photos only.

Page Size: 13 x 19 inches
Impression area: 11.5 x 16 inches 
Framed/Lined Image Area: 9.5 x 13.25 inches 

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