George Brookshaw

Pineapple: Green Antigua Pineapple with smooth leaves.

George Brookshaw was a publisher of botanical subjects
as well as a teacher of flower painting and his own artist. The ninety plates
of his dramatic folio, Pomona Britannica, depict two hundred and
fifty-six varieties of fruit grown in some of London’s most celebrated gardens
and in particular, the Royal Gardens at Hampton Court.

Pomona Britannica is engraved in aquatint and stipple, printed in colour and finished
by hand in watercolour. In most of the plates the fruit, sometimes accompanied
by its flower, is represented against a dark aquatint background to suggest a
sense of high drama. At a time when folio flower-books such as Robert
Thornton’s Temple of Flora were having difficulty finding purchasers,
Brookshaw’s Pomona proved a success. Indeed, in 1817 a fine quarto
edition was published with little expense spared.