Making of Lilies & Roses of P.J. Redouté

The article describes an 11-month project to restore and digitally present two famous botanical collections by Pierre-Joseph Redouté, *Les Liliacées* and *Les Roses*, which contain 486 and 169 plates respectively. The project aimed to highlight Redouté’s detailed stippling and watercolor techniques, using high-resolution scans from the Internet Archive and Biodiversity Heritage Library to create a website that lets the illustrations "speak for themselves." The author notes that while Redouté’s work is widely available online, this project sought to offer a unique presentation that emphasizes the beauty and detail of the original illustrations.

“Patience” was this project’s theme. Breathing new life into Les Liliacées and Les Roses—two of Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s most well known collections—taught me a lot about it during the 11 months this project took to complete. Simply put, Redouté’s illustrations are stunning. His attention to detail in stippling and watercolor has earned him the title “the Raphael of Flowers” and is considered the greatest botanical illustrator of all time. By restoring his illustrations, I had the opportunity to become intimately familiar with his techniques and develop a deeper appreciation for his efforts. Redouté’s work has crossed my path a number times over the years but it didn’t catch my attention until I was researching source material for Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants several years prior. The main deterrent then was that it was only available in French and I was limited myself to only English-based projects at the time. Since then, I wanted to find a way to create a project based on his works—but one that was a little different than just posting scans online and selling them like so many have already done. Structurally, Les Liliacées and Les Roses are relatively simple and similar to other collections of scientific illustrations—both showcase large illustrations paired with brief descriptions about their characteristics and nomenclature. Les Liliacées comprised 486 plates of 476 lilies published in 8 volumes between 1802 and 1816 while Les Roses comprised 169 roses published in 3 volumes between 1827 and 1833. The title, Les Liliacées is slightly misleading because it includes representatives of the lily such as amaryllis, orchids, irises, and more. Each illustration depicts a single lily or rose with a few exceptions posed to accentuate the bold, yet delicate nature of the flowers and the stems supporting them adorned with leaves of all shapes and sizes. Most lilies include a detailed root system at the bottom and have a couple of greyscale sketches of enlarged parts of the flower such as pistils, petals, stamens, etc. Most roses are only depicted from the stem upward. Below each is the Latin and French names written in beautiful calligraphy. While the leaves take up the most space in most illustrations, the flowers are the focal points—exploding with color from impossibly thin stems, nestled within enormous leaves, or sprinkled throughout delicate branches. These would be the focus for this project. The beginning of the video below from the Joel Oppenheimer Gallery provides a nice overview of two of Redouté’s illustrations and discusses the techniques he used. Since Redouté is so well known, his illustrations are readily available on many sites that appreciate his work. After some digging, I found the best results on the Internet Archive contributed by the Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Library of Congress. They had the best quality scans by far and at resolutions larger than any I’ve worked with on previous projects—averaging at around 4500×6700 pixels. Links to each are included below. Note: At the time of this writing, the Internet Archive is recovering from an attack that took down their services so their links may not work correctly and their scans may not appear on the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s site. Les Liliacées: Les Roses: My sincerest thanks and appreciation goes to these websites. Their willingness to make their collections freely available to the public is invaluable. How do you design a site that highlights such monumental work? By letting it speak for itself. A guiding principal I had early on was “grand elegance.” I wanted to create a design that lets the beauty of Redouté’s work shine while the rest gets out of the way. Most online galleries include small thumbnails of each illustration, showcasing the full compositions but diminish the beautiful colors of each flower. Others show only a subset of plates and none include the original descriptions. These collections are perfectly fine in their own right. They provide a wealth of information about each plate and serve their audiences well. I wanted to do something bigger and bolder—something that focused on the flowers and their colors. My site structure was simple by design: a home page, a page for each plate where it can shine, clear and interesting ways to browse the two collections, a page about the posters for sale, and a page about the project. The plate, home, and browsing pages have a lot of interesting details. The others are relatively standard. The first page I designed is where visitors would spend most of their time examining each plate and its accompanying description. My plan was to create a template that would work with every plate but showcase them in a way so each page stands on its own with strong imagery. I also wanted to display the plate as large as possible, essentially hitting visitors over the head with each illustration’s beauty. Early inspiration came from the National Audubon Society’s gallery of birds drawn by John Audubon himself. On large resolutions, the focal point of each illustration fills the screen, followed by the original description and a link to view the full plate. The layout is simple but effective. I liked the large images but they are a little jarring with a bird’s large eyes staring back at me. Still, the idea struck a chord and inspired me to try a few of my own variations. My first attempts top row above were rough, as most usually are. I took cues from the Audubon Society and my own earlier projects but the results didn’t live up to my vision yet. I liked the idea of filling the screen with the full illustration but there wasn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for framing the flowers nicely across all plates. The fourth iteration top right was the spark of an idea that I ended up using in the final design. I found that I particularly enjoyed seeing the scientific name of each flower in a large serif typeface so I incorporated that into the next several iterations. The next few designs bottom row introduced a darker palette to make the page feel more welcoming with a dark forest green since some shade of it appeared in every illustration’s leaves. The darker colors added a much-needed contrast to the main areas of the page. The eighth version lower right is when things really started to click. Using varying shades of green and subtle shadows created layers of content and added a nice sense of depth without looking tacky. Using a large version of the illustration as a subtle page background texture also served as a nice way to add visual variety to the page template. During these experiments, I discovered the typeface I would use for the project—Google’s Literata. I’m a sucker for large bold serif typography and Literata worked well for the modern, yet classic look I was developing. It’s easy to read at small sizes for body copy, has a lot of character in its italics style, and has a healthy amount of contrast in the bold weight at large sizes—perfect for this project. There was still the problem of showcasing each illustration’s flower. Showing the full plate diminished it too much. The white background also didn’t help because the small flowers became hard to see. That’s when I got the idea to try a dark background and work on an all-dark design. I hadn’t created a dark design from scratch for some time—the last one being for Mathematical Instruments in 2022. As a test, I spent a little time roughly replacing the white background with a very dark grey color and thought the result looked great. Little did I realize what I was getting myself into. More on that later. The last experiment finally gave me the “wow” moment. Adding a hero image with a dark background brought it to life. I loved the cropped look and the large title with a faded overlay. That immediately struck me with the flower’s beauty and Redouté’s attention to detail and encouraged me as a viewer to want to see more, so having the full view with the accompanying description below it felt very natural. There was also a nice balance to the page with the positions of the image and text swapped in the bottom half from their positions in the hero. The final design came to life over the course of building out the rest of the project. After the dark background was added to each image, I determined the best position for it to be placed in the hero area to frame the flower s . The one-size-fits all solution I was looking for only needed a little customization for each hero image. I was so pleased with the result that I looked forward to seeing how each hero image would look and still enjoy browsing through them. They also work very well on all screen sizes. Below are a handful of full page screenshots and hero images. There are four key elements to the final design: hero area, full plate, description, and background: The hero area showcases a magnified, cropped view of the overall plate on the right with its names and plate number overlaid on the left. Both Latin and French names are included like in Redouté’s descriptions. The Latin name is written in large bold type to complement, but not overshadow the character of each flower. A subtle gradient between the text and the image ensures legibility. On narrower resolutions, the overlay appears toward the bottom since horizontal space is at a premium and it anchors the cropped image nicely. To the left and right of the title are links to navigate to the previous and next plates in numerical order. The full-resolution image is loaded as a background image for the display rather than a crop to save on the need for creating multiple versions of the same image. It’s “cropped” with a simple combination of background-position and background-size . The full plate is available in two colors in the left bottom half of the page. Each plate was restored and made available with both light and dark backgrounds more on those later . Every plate can be magnified to see the high resolution version. Several lilies were represented with multiple plates e.g., Pitcairnia latifolia and Sagittaria sagittifolia where one plate showed with the entire plant and the other a magnified version, a few plates included two smaller lilies, and one was spread across two plates with a third used for a large greyscale sketch of its bulb Amaryllis josephinæ . All roses were only illustrated on one plate each. In cases where multiple plates were used for a single flower, links were provided to switch between the plates. The description for each flower was transcribed from the original scans and kept in French as it was written. I didn’t have the resources to have them translated to English and didn’t want to rely on an automated translation service because the latter is often prone to errors. However, at the bottom of each description is a link to translate it into other languages if readers want to read it in their own language. While scrolling through the description, the full plate remains in view so it can be referenced. Finally, the background is another enlarged version of the high-resolution plate and adds a nice subtle texture variation to the pages. The full plate and description are elevated above it with shadows and the description has a translucent lighter background color that blurs the background image under it to ensure legibility. In an effort to save time and resources, the same full-size original image is used three ways on these pages hero, full plate, and background rather than creating multiple versions of the same file. This saved on server calls and eliminated the need to crate multiple versions of the same image. The full-size images can be fairly large, but they’re the only image loaded on each page so it was a nice compromise. The gateways to each plate are the browsing pages. From the beginning I wanted to create collages of lilies and roses arranged by color as a fun way to explore them. Rough versions of each were created as a