The Florilegium
Print detail — every line holds at full size

The Temple of Flora

The Campion, Male and Female

Lychnis

Two plants on one plate — because this species keeps its sexes apart.

Book
New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus
Artist
after Robert John Thornton
Date
1799–1807
Held by
Wellcome Collection · via Wikimedia Commons
Lychnis

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

Campion is dioecious — an individual plant is either male or female, never both — so Thornton draws two entire plants side by side, which is exactly the sort of thing his book existed to do. Linnaeus had classified plants by their sexual parts, to enormous scandal; clergymen wrote that the system was unfit for young women. Thornton spent his fortune making the scandalous system beautiful. He set out to make a taxonomy fashionable and went bankrupt doing it.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

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

The Campion, Male and Female framed on the wall
The Campion, Male and Female framed on the wall
The Campion, Male and Female framed on the wall
The Campion, Male and Female framed on the wall

About this reproduction

  • A faithful reproduction of a public-domain plate held by Wellcome Collection · via Wikimedia Commons — the work is centuries out of copyright (1799–1807).
  • 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

The Garden Poppy — New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus, after Robert John Thornton, 1799–1807

1799–1807

The Garden Poppy

The flowering stem and the seed head together — beauty and its consequence.

Papaver somniferum
The Tobacco Plant — New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus, after Robert John Thornton, 1799–1807

1799–1807

The Tobacco Plant

Two species of the plant that paid for the eighteenth century.

Nicotiana rustica
Monkshood — New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus, after Robert John Thornton, 1799–1807

1799–1807

Monkshood

The most poisonous plant in an English garden, drawn as a decoration.

Aconitum napellus