Six Progressive Lessons For Flower Painting: With Directions for Drawing and Colouring of Flowers, Upon Botanical Principals

(9 1/8 x 13 inches). 16 unnumbered engraved plates, including four in three states, one in outline with two hand-coloured, and two in two states, hand-coloured and uncoloured (10 hand-coloured in total). Contemporary ownership inscription to front pastedown, Henrietta Louisa Shiffner: July, 1811. Contemporary half roan over marbled boards, with printed title label to upper board A Regency flower-painting manual from Ackermann's Repository of Arts, preserving the staged method by which students learned to draw, shade, and colour flowers from engraved models. Published during Rudolph Ackermann's most productive period as a publisher of colour-plate books and artistic instruction, Six Progressive Lessons for Flower Painting belongs to the practical drawing-book culture of early nineteenth-century London. Its purpose is explicit: to guide the learner through the drawing and colouring of flowers upon botanical principles, joining ornamental accomplishment with close observation of plant form. Several designs are presented in more than one state, moving from outline or uncoloured impressions to hand-coloured examples. This progressive format allowed the student to compare stages of execution and to understand how form, shading, and colour were built up. The presence of ten hand-coloured plates gives the book the character of both an instructional manual and a pattern book, with the finished examples serving as models for practice. Ackermann was especially well placed to publish such a work. His Repository of Arts at the Strand combined printselling, publishing, drawing instruction, and artists' materials, and his name was closely associated with the refinement of British colour-plate publishing in the Regency period. Manuals of this kind also reflect the period's broader culture of polite education, in which flower painting occupied a respected place among accomplishments taught to young women, while also drawing on the visual discipline of botanical illustration. Provenance: The ownership inscription, dated July 1811, records Henrietta Louisa Shiffner, likely the daughter of George Shiffner of Coombe Place, Sussex, later Sir George Shiffner, 1st Baronet, and Mary Bridger. Born in 1795, she would have been about sixteen when she inscribed the book, placing this copy directly within the educational context for which such drawing manuals were produced. The inscription gives the volume a contemporary female provenance, closely aligned with the subject and use of the book. Not in Abbey, Life.…