Empress Josephine Rose

The story of this print

Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759–1840) painted the roses of Empress Josephine’s garden at Malmaison, and Les Roses, published in Paris between 1817 and 1824, is the book that made his name. This plate shows the rose the museum records as the ‘Empress Josephine’ or Frankfort rose, Rosa turbinata. One stem rises from the bottom edge to a single wide-open bloom near the top, a loosely double flower of clear pink with a small golden eye of stamens. To its right a short side branch carries four buds at different stages, one still tight and green, two opening into pink, and one whose petals have fallen back to show a bright orange-gold cluster. Three groups of toothed leaves, blue-green above and paler beneath, spread along the stem.

Close up, the picture is a color stipple engraving: the tones are built from thousands of tiny dots rather than lines, which gives the petals their soft, powdery gradation from pale pink at the edges to deeper rose in the folds. The leaves are drawn with crisp serrated edges and fine parallel veins. The paper is a warm cream with a faint mottling and a few small age spots, and the engraved caption at the foot gives the Latin and French names in a flowing script, with P. J. Redouté pinx. at the left, the printer’s name in the center and the engraver’s name, Bessin, at the right.

As vintage botanical wall art it suits a bedroom, a dressing room, a hallway, a powder room or a sitting room with a traditional or French feel. The pink, green and cream go with white, blush, sage and soft gray walls, and with painted or pale wood furniture. The tall shape fits above a dresser, beside a bed or on a narrow wall. It hangs naturally with Crown Imperial and Erica Fulgida, two more Redouté plates from the same museum, and with Vintage-Style Botanical Peony for a second full pink flower.

What we did to this scan

1. Used as the museum photographed and published it: no retouching and no color changes.
2. Enlarged 2× for print with Real-ESRGAN, an AI upscaler, so the engraved line and stipple hold at large sizes.

About this particular sheet. Made from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access photograph of the plate, used as published and enlarged 2× for print; the museum's record is linked on this page.

Every print is credited to its archive here and in your order confirmation. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn. How we restore.