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The American Cowslip, Plate 26

Thomas Warner

1801

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Romanticism Early 19th Century Floral

Dominant colour

About this work

You see a single yellow flower—an American cowslip—resting on a dark, plain background. The petals curl slightly, and the leaves fan out like tiny green hands. This print comes from a book called *The Temple of Flora*, where plants were shown almost like celebrities. The artist made each one look alive, even though the book was meant for science, not just beauty. It’s strange to think of a flower as exotic back then, but this one was new to England. If you like this, look up subject: england, late 18th-early 19th century for more plants that traveled the world.

The story of this work

Overview

Fueled by scientific and colonial expeditions that brought back plant specimens from across the globe, the science of botany blossomed in Enlightenment Europe. This print is from a sumptuously illustrated treatise known as The Temple of Flora . Commissioned and published by Dr. Robert John Thornton, a British medical botanist, the work illustrates the new plant classification system of Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus. Yet while these prints realistically depict buds, flowers, and leaves, they show them in environments where they did not actually grow. Instead, Thornton had the artists situate…