Fleurs, fruits et feuillages choisis de la flore et de la pomone de l' Ile de Java peints d'apres nature par Madame Berthe Hoola van Nooten

With a half-title, title, dedication to the Queen of the Netherlands and foreword in French, parallel text in French and English. Third, and improved edition of this magnificent display of spectacular Javanese fruits and flowers, their bright colours ideally suited to the then new technique of chromolithography. One textpage restored in the corner, not touching the text. Berthe Hoola van Nooten [12 October 1817], was a Dutch botanical artist, noted for her botanical plates illustrating "Fleurs, Fruits et Feuillages Choisis de l'Ile de Java" in 1863-64.Van Nooten was the daughter of a vicar and on 11 July 1838 she married Dirk Hoola van Nooten, a judge in Paramaribo. Being interested in botany, she regularly sent specimens of cultivated plants to the botanical gardens in Holland, collected on trips through Suriname and Java with her husband. Personal tragedy and financial disaster struck with her husband's death in 1847, leaving her stranded in Java with large debts and a young family of five, a situation much like that faced by Maria Sibylla Merian and Elizabeth Blackwell. Aware of the vogue in Europe for lavish illustrations of exotic flora, she set about producing 40 plates depicting interesting plant species from Java. Your eye is immediately captured by the dark leaves, shown furled or crumpled or partly nibbled away by insects, the delicately rendered details of the follicles and seeds, and the heavy clusters of flowers that cascade down the page.Her attempts to publish the work were unsuccessful until she acquired the patronage of Sophia Mathilde, wife of King William III of the Netherlands. The exceptionally well executed chromolithographs were done by Pieter Depannemaeker, the Belgian lithographer operating from Ledeberg in Ghent. "Van Nooten was clearly a more than competent artist, for the splendid tropical plants, with their lush foliage, vividly coloured flowers and exotic fruit, have been depicted with great skill. She managed to accentuate the splendour of each species by adopting a style that combined great precision and clarity with a touch of neo-Baroque exuberance, reveling in the rich forms and colours of the tropics. The reader's eye is immediately captured by the dark leaves, shown furled or crumpled or partly nibbled away by insects, the delicately rendered details of the follicles and seeds, and the heavy clusters of flowers that cascade down the page. The excellent reproduction of the artist's drawings in the form of chromolithographs lends a tactile quality to these striking images." — Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, An Oak Spring Flora.