Garden Parsley
A prison-break, drawn one plant at a time.
- Work
- Garden Parsley (Apium hortense), Plate 174, from A Curious Herbal
- Artist / naturalist
- Elizabeth Blackwell
- Origin & date
- London, 1737–1739
- Held by
- Wikimedia Commons (Wellcome Collection)
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and keep.
Size
$19.00
The story
Elizabeth Blackwell drew, engraved, and hand-colored every one of the 500 plates in A Curious Herbal (1737–1739) herself — a feat undertaken to raise the money to free her husband from debtors' prison, working from live specimens at London's Chelsea Physic Garden with its curators checking each plate for botanical accuracy. Garden Parsley, a kitchen herb familiar enough to seem an unlikely subject for heroics, is rendered with the same unadorned precision she gave every plant: root, stem, leaf, flower head, and seed, each labeled and separated for clear identification, no landscape or ornament to distract from the specimen itself. What to notice: this plain, functional style was a deliberate choice — apothecaries used A Curious Herbal as a working reference to identify medicinal plants, and Blackwell's uncluttered plates were built to be legible first, beautiful second.
About this reproduction
- Faithful reproduction of a public-domain work, sourced from Wikimedia Commons (Wellcome Collection)’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.
