Beautiful old botanical paintings of cacti today from the book: “Iconographie descriptive des cactees, ou, Essais systematiques et raisonnes sur l’histoire naturelle, la classification et la culture des plantes de cette famille“. Which translates (roughly) to: Featured iconography cacti, or systematic and reasoned essays on natural history, classification and cultivation of plants in this family. Quite the title. The author is a certain Ch. Lemaire and was published in Paris between 1841 and 1847. The age of the book means they are in the public domain in US and the UK, Europe, Australia and all countries that follow the rule of year of death plus 70 years. It comes to us, once again, care of the brilliant plant art treasure chest that is the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
The first name given below is the one on the original plate (which you can check by zooming in on the image), the second name in brackets is the currently accepted species name as ascertained by BHL. How accurate this is for all specimens may need further examination. Names can be a quagmire as we have seen before. Names aside, these are some beautiful paintings – showing architectural stems, erupting flowers and elegant spines (which are actually modified leaves) of this majestic plant family – Cactaceae.
Click on the image for a higher resolution PDF.
Echinocactus horizonthalonius (Echinocactus horisontalinus)
Echinocactus hexaedrophorus (Thelocactus hexaedrophorus)
Echinocactus coptonogonus (Stenocactus coptonogonus)
Echinocactus erinaceus (Parodia erinacea)
Echinocactus concinnus (Parodia concinna)
Echinocactus gibbosus (Gymnocalycium gibbosum)
Echinocactus (Astrophytum) myriostigma (Astrophytum myriostigma)
Echinocactus pectiniferus (Echinocereus pectinatus)
Echinocactus pentacanthus (Stenocactus obvallatus)
Echinocactus sellowianus (Parodia sellowii)
Cereus perrotetianus (Cereus hexagonus)
Mammillaria dolichocentra (Mammillaria tetracantha)
Mammillaria erecta (Coryphantha erecta)
Mammillaria elephantidens (Coryphantha elephantidens)