Customer Reviews

Garden Eden : Masterpieces of Botanical Book Illustration

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is GREAT! This book is beautiful, this book is wonderful!!! [gee, think I like the book?] If you are considering buying only one book of botanical illustrations this is the perfect book to start with. If you have many books of botanical works of art this will be a valued addition to them. It is basically a sampling of botanical works of art throughout history. It includes many different artists from all different countries and all differnet styles. The one thing they all share in common is beauty.
If you want to purchase books of botanical illustration and don't know where or with whom to start this is the perfect book for you because it displays so many different artists, techniques time periods and styles.
Even if you already have a collection of this art I can still highly recommend this book. It is that good. I don't think that the book loses much of anything by being a paperback. The cover is of a very heavy material with a vibrant illustration on it. It is a coated cover so that it will stand up to quite a bit of wear. Please don't let that stop you from purchsing this wonderful book. There is so very much to look at and study here, it is a book that you will never tire of browsing through. It is also a great reference for reviewing a large number of different masters in this art form. Get this one, you will not regret it!

This large format, beautiful book reproduces a few images from each of the many illustrated botanical books in the Vienna Library. Each book is described briefly in German, English and French. Many are quite rare and seldom available even in the largest libraries in America. The reproductions are high quality and give a good sense of the contents of the books. Anyone interested in botanical illustrations and their history will surely want to own this book. It is amazingly low cost for its quality, like many Taschen publications. My one disappointment is that the library holds few of the treasures of American botanical illustrations, so that they are absent from the book.

The botanical prints in the huge volume are lovely, but I thought that there would be more prints such as the one on the book cover that show flowers in a natural or landscape setting. It turns out that this is one of the ONLY prints of that kind in the book. Also the book arrived WARPED which is probably why it was so inexpensive.

This book is for anyone who loves nature and botanical drawings. There are many full-page colored illustrations of plants, fruits and flowers suitable for framing. It's also a nice coffee table book and a conversation starter. Very nice book and worth every cent!