Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759-1840) remains the most celebrated botanical painter in the history of European art, known above all for his rose and lily illustrations produced under the patronage of the Empress Joséphine at Malmaison. Born in Saint-Hubert, in what is now Belgium, the son of a decorative painter, he came from a family of artists and began painting as a boy. He moved to Paris in 1782 and found work at the Jardin du Roi, where the Dutch flower painter Gerard van Spaendonck taught him the transparent watercolour technique on vellum that Redouté would refine and apply across the following six decades. Through Van Spaendonck and the botanist Charles Louis L'Héritier de Brutelle, Redouté gained access to the French court, and by 1788 he had been appointed botanical artist to Queen Marie Antoinette, a position that survived her execution only because Redouté proved adept, in the years of revolutionary upheaval that followed, at remaining useful to whichever regime held power.
The most productive and celebrated period of Redouté's career began around 1798, when the Empress Joséphine, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, engaged him to document the extraordinary plant collection she was assembling at the Château de Malmaison, which eventually included more than two hundred and fifty rose varieties gathered from across the world, some reaching her gardens even as British and French vessels remained formally at war. Redouté's Les Liliacées, published in eight folio volumes between 1802 and 1816, and his celebrated Les Roses, issued in three volumes between 1817 and 1824 with 170 plates, combined scientific precision with a compositional restraint, isolating each flower without background or setting, that has made his work as admired today by collectors of fine art as by botanists and historians of horticulture; several of the rose varieties he recorded are now extinct, giving his plates a documentary as well as an artistic value. Following Joséphine's death in 1814, Redouté endured some difficult years before securing an appointment as Master of Draughtsmanship at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris in 1822, where he also taught, numbering several aristocrats among his pupils. He was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1825 and continued painting and teaching until his death in 1840, having served, across four French regimes, artists of the calibre and status of five queens and empresses of France.
John Mitchell Fine Paintings' holdings of Redouté include studies of spring flowers, lilacs and pansies that reflect his characteristic combination of botanical accuracy and decorative elegance, and connect naturally with the gallery's wider group of eighteenth and nineteenth-century flower and still-life painting, including work by his own teacher, Gerard van Spaendonck, and by Georg Frederik Ziesel, both also represented in the collection. The gallery has previously exhibited a selection of flower and still-life paintings of this kind, reflecting a consistent area of specialist interest.