James Britten (after Banks)
In 1899, after protracted discussions, the Trustees of the British Museum agreed to publish, for wider dissemination, a limited edition of botanical prints from Captain James Cook's first and second voyages in H.M.S. Endeavour. The original watercolour drawings which had been transferred to copper plates, between 1771 and 1784, under the supervision of Sir Joseph Banks, are now generally referred to as the "florilegium" and had come into the Museum's possession, by bequest, in 1827.
In order to contain the costs of production it was decided to transfer the original designs to lithographic stones for printing. Even so (and despite the intention to reproduce the whole of Banks' Florilegium by this method), the cost and time taken for the work decided the Museum to desist, after the three parts of "Illustrations of Australian Plants" had been released between 1900 and 1905. The prints we have available are from that edition, which was published under the direction of James Britten, who also updated Dr. Daniel Solander's original nomenclature.
It was only in the 1980s that the British Museum did eventually publish Banks' Florilegium from the original copper plates.
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