The Albany Pitcher Plant

Cephalotus follicularis

A carnivorous plant found once, at the bottom of the world, and drawn perfectly the first time.

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

Cephalotus follicularis

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 Albany pitcher plant grows in one corner of south-western Australia and nowhere else on earth, and this is the drawing that introduced it to science. Bauer sailed with Matthew Flinders on the Investigator, drew in the field in outline, and recorded colour by writing numbers on the sheet — keyed to a chart of roughly a thousand tints he had made in advance — so that he could paint accurately in London three years later. Nobody has ever improved on the method or the result. He drew what he saw, then proved it by numbers.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

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

The Albany Pitcher Plant framed on the wall

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