Exotic Elegance: Silver Vase Plant in Vintage Chromolithographic Art, circa 1890

A bromeliad rosette in full flower, an original color chromolithograph from the Revue Horticole, circa 1890. The sheet is headed "Revue Horticole" at the upper left, and the lower margin carries the imprint "Godard del." (drawn by Godard) and "Lith. Marotte, Paris". The plant is catalogued as Aechmea fasciata, the silver vase or urn plant, a bromeliad native to Brazil.

The plant is seen from above, filling the sheet. Long, spiny-edged leaves radiate outward from a central cup, arching and curling at the tips, their upper surfaces flushed with brick red and salmon over a grayish green ground. At the heart of the rosette sits a compact head of upright pink and white bracts and small flowers touched with yellow. The coloring is laid on in soft graded washes with fine toothing drawn along the leaf edges, typical of the chromolithographed plant portraits made for French horticultural journals.

Bromeliads of this kind were prized novelties in nineteenth-century European glasshouses, and illustrated journals such as this one introduced them to collectors and nurserymen with a lithographed portrait of each new arrival. The title line at the foot of the sheet is partly cropped.