Pierre-Joseph Redoute

Pierre-Joseph Redoute was born on 10 July 1759 in Saint-Hubert, in the Ardennes region then belonging to the Duchy of Luxembourg and now part of Belgium, into a family of painters that included his father and grandfather. He had no formal academic education. His father taught him to paint as a young child, and at age 13 he left home to work as an itinerant painter, decorating interiors and painting portraits and religious commissions across Flanders and the Low Countries while studying the Flemish masters on his own. During these years he acquired roughly a year of further training in an atelier in Liege.

In 1782, at age 23, Redoute joined his older brother in Paris to work as a stage-set designer for the Theatre Italien. There he received instruction in color printing, attended lectures by Gerard van Spaendonck, the Royal Professor of flower painting, and learned stipple engraving from Gilles Demarteau, the royal engraver. Around the same period he met the botanists Charles Louis L'Heritier de Brutelle and Rene Desfontaines, who steered him toward botanical illustration; L'Heritier in particular taught him to dissect flowers and render their diagnostic features with precision. In 1786 and 1787 he traveled to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, near London, to study exotic plants and refine his printmaking technique.

Redoute became an official court artist to Marie Antoinette and continued working through the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. His most celebrated period began under the patronage of Empress Josephine, for whom he produced botanical watercolors at the Chateau de Malmaison that became the basis of Les Liliacees (published 1802 to 1815, roughly 500 plates) and, later, Les Roses (1817 to 1824). He went on to illustrate Choix des plus belles fleurs et des plus beaux fruits (1827 to 1833) and, across his career, contributed to roughly 50 botanical books totaling more than 2,100 published plates depicting some 1,800 species; these totals are widely repeated in secondary sources but were not independently re-verified for this profile. He was made a Chevalier of the Legion d'honneur in 1825, and in 1834 Belgium awarded him the Order of Leopold. He continued painting into old age and is reported, in some biographical accounts, to have held a later teaching appointment tied to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, though this detail has not been independently confirmed.

Redoute died suddenly of a stroke in Paris on 19 June 1840, at the age of 80; some reference sources give the date as 20 June 1840. He was buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Redoute earned the nickname "the Raphael of flowers" during his lifetime and has been called by later historians the greatest botanical illustrator of all time. Modern institutions echo that view in practical terms, holding his plates and watercolors as both art-historical and scientific record: the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Teylers Museum in Haarlem have each built exhibitions around their Redoute holdings, and his prints remain a fixture of collections devoted to natural history illustration.

Redoute's market runs on two very different tracks. The most frequently cited high-value sale is Empress Josephine's own painted manuscript for Les Liliacees, reported to have sold for USD 5.5 million at Sotheby's New York on 11 June 1985, a sale said to have lasted about three minutes and to have been bought by the dealer W. Graham Arader on behalf of a syndicate. That figure comes from a single specialist source and could not be independently confirmed as an all-time auction record against major market databases, so it is best read as the highest documented sale rather than a verified record. Below that level, the great majority of Redoute material on the market consists of individual hand-colored stipple engravings and later print editions, which trade far more modestly, typically in the low to mid five figures or less depending on subject, edition, and condition. There is not enough repeat-sale auction data in the public record to support a reliable price index or trend line for his work; individual sales should be read on their own terms rather than as points on a smooth curve.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Redoute, and no living estate or gallery representation in the modern sense; his market is handled by specialist antiquarian and botanical print dealers such as Arader Galleries, alongside general auction houses. Because his output ranges from unique commissioned watercolors to mass-produced stipple engravings issued in varying states and later reprintings, value depends heavily on distinguishing an original plate or first-edition impression from a later reproduction, and provenance and condition matter more than they would for a unique canvas. Collectors researching him should also expect to see his name indexed in different forms, including "Redoute, Pierre-Joseph" and the unaccented "Pierre Joseph Redoute," across auction databases and library catalogues; all such forms refer to the same single artist, born 1759 and died 1840.