One of the 100 plates from Christoph Jacob Trew’s Plantae Selectae, €34,000 (£29,150) at Jeschke Jadi Auctions in Berlin.
Christoph Jacob Trew (1695-1769), a wealthy doctor and amateur botanist from Nuremberg, hired local engravers Johann Jacob Haid and Johann Elias Haid to produce the 100 plates that were based on drawings he had purchased piecemeal from the great flower painter Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708-70).
Beginning his working life as a gardener’s apprentice near Heidelberg, Ehret lived and worked in London in the 1740s when he associated with both Sir Hans Sloane and Phillip Miller at the Chelsea Physic Garden.
As Trew died before the last of the three parts had been finished, the project was completed only with the help of Benedict Christian Vogel, a professor of botany at the University of Altdorf.
The copy offered at Jeschke Jadi Auctions (28.95% buyer’s premium inc tax) in Berlin on April 27 was described as “extremely well-preserved with contemporary colouring of the plates”.
Despite a relatively soft market for botanical plate books, it surpassed the €24,000-30,000 estimate to bring €34,000 (£29,150).
