The German Iris

Iris germanica

The medicinal plant that saved a family — in Blackwell’s own watercolour.

Book: Iris Germanica, from A Curious Herbal
Artist: Elizabeth Blackwell
Date: 1737–1739
Held by: Wikimedia Commons

Iris germanica

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

With her husband in debtors' prison, Elizabeth Blackwell drew, engraved, and hand-coloured five hundred medicinal plants herself — a herbal for the apothecaries of London, and the work that bought his freedom. Beautiful, useful, and quietly heroic: one of the first great flower books made by a woman. She did every step of the work alone because she could not afford to pay anyone else to do any of it.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

The German Iris 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 Wikimedia Commons — the work is centuries out of copyright (1737–1739).
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