The Blue Tinsel Lily

Calectasia cyanea

A flower with a metallic sheen — and the hardest thing in the book to colour.

Book: Illustrationes Florae Novae Hollandiae
Artist: Ferdinand Bauer
Date: 1801–1806
Held by: David Rumsey Map Collection · via Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons

Calectasia cyanea

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore, down to the stipple.

Size

$29.00

The story

The blue tinsel lily of Western Australia has a violet-blue flower with a genuinely metallic sheen, which is close to the worst possible subject for a man recording colour in numbers on a ship. Bauer got it. Working from a coded field sketch three years and half a world later, he produced a bloom that still reads as iridescent on the page. The colour chart was his solution to a problem nobody else had even framed. He solved the hardest problem in field botany with a numbered list.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

The Blue Tinsel Lily printed large and framed, hung in rooms like yours. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

About this reproduction

A faithful reproduction of a public-domain plate held by David Rumsey Map Collection · via Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons — the work is centuries out of copyright (1801–1806).
Printed to order on archival cotton-rag stock, pigment inks rated 100+ years (inscribed pieces and atelier bouquets are set by hand and printed to order).
Colour-managed to the source scan: the hand-colour is the colourist’s, not ours. We correct nothing and invent nothing.
Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed pieces ship flat-packed).
If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our plates cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans in existence, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the stipple that makes a petal look soft, the wash of the hand-colourist, the veins of the leaf — on stock made to outlive its owner. A poster reproduces the picture. This reproduces the plate.

From the same hand