The Florilegium
Print detail — every line holds at full size

The Temple of Flora

Cupid Inspiring the Plants with Love

The allegory that opens the book — botany announced as a romance.

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

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

Thornton opened his book with an allegory rather than a flower: Cupid in a tropical landscape, firing at the plants. The point was not decoration. Linnaeus had classified the vegetable kingdom by its sexual organs and written about "husbands" and "brides" in the same bed, and the English establishment was appalled; Thornton's response was to lean all the way in and present the system as a love story with pictures. It worked artistically and failed commercially, like everything else he attempted. He answered a scandal by making it larger and lovelier.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

Cupid Inspiring the Plants with Love printed large and framed, hung in rooms like yours. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

Cupid Inspiring the Plants with Love framed on the wall
Cupid Inspiring the Plants with Love framed on the wall
Cupid Inspiring the Plants with Love framed on the wall
Cupid Inspiring the Plants with Love 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 Campion, Male and Female — New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus, after Robert John Thornton, 1799–1807

1799–1807

The Campion, Male and Female

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

Lychnis
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