Alpine Plants
/All four volumes of Joseph Seboth’s Die Alpenpflanzen nach der Natur gemalt (Alpine plants painted from nature) are available from the Internet Archive here. The books were published between 1879 and 1884.
The author does not have an entry in Wikipedia so it is difficult to learn very much about him. He was referred to in The Art of Botanical Illustration (Wilfrid Blunt, William Thomas Steam. 1949) as someone omitted from the book….but they did not give any rationale for the omission. There was a Czech site that has more information (after Google translated the page):
Seboth was Austrian and a prominent illustrator of botanical books.
He lived from 1814-1883 so these 4 books were completed just before his death. They were published in Prague.
Some of the references to this series of books published soon after were critical of the illustrations. There are not extra drawings of flower parts or seeds in the illustrations so maybe that made them more art and less ‘botanical print.’
Still – the illustrations are worth browsing through. I find botanical images like these particularly appealing on rainy days and all during the winter!
