The Large Sunflower
A New World import, drawn life-size for a prince-bishop’s garden catalog.
- Work
- Flos Solis Maior (Large Sunflower), from Hortus Eystettensis
- Artist / naturalist
- Basilius Besler
- Origin & date
- Nuremberg, 1613
- Held by
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston · via Wikimedia Commons
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and keep.
Size
$19.00
The story
Basilius Besler's Hortus Eystettensis (1613) catalogued every plant in the garden of Johann Konrad von Gemmingen, the prince-bishop of Eichstätt — one of the first books to render garden flowers at true scale rather than shrink them to fit the page. The sunflower was still a novelty in 1613, a recent arrival from the Americas that European gardeners grew as much for spectacle as botany, and Besler gives it the star treatment: a single bloom filling the entire folio sheet, every spiraling floret in its seed-head individually engraved. What to notice: Besler organized his four-volume garden by season, not by plant family — this plate belonged to the summer volume, when the prince-bishop's garden would have actually looked like this. It is less a scientific record than a portrait of one man's very expensive hobby.
About this reproduction
- Faithful reproduction of a public-domain work, sourced from Museum of Fine Arts, Boston · via Wikimedia Commons’s open-access release.
- Printed to order on 200gsm EMA matte art paper: smooth, no glare.
- Color-managed to the source scan.
- Ships in 5–8 business days; satisfaction guarantee.
