Cattleya Citrina [Yellow Serpent]

St. Albans: J. French for F. Sander & Co., H. Sotheran & Co. of London, Paul Parey of Berlin, [etc.], 1895. Chromolithograph. Very good condition apart from some very minor rippling. A fine image from Sander's 'Reichenbachia. Orchids illustrated and described', an authoritative work illustrated with life-size plates, one of the greatest of all works on orchids.

Born in Bremen in 1847, Sander came to Britain in 1865 and worked in nurseries in Forest Hill. He started his own independent business by 1874 and opened the famous St. Albans establishment in 1881. The firm was later expanded to include establishments in both America and Belgium. His Reichenbachia was named in honour of Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach (1824-1889), ornithologist, botanist and celebrated orchidologist. A contemporary work notes that in the spring of 1894, Sander's had twenty orchid collectors working simultaneously in Brazil, Columbia, Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, Madagascar, New Guinea, Burma and Malaya. (see Hon. Mrs. Evelyn Cecil, A History of Gardening in England, 1910, pp. 281-282.) "By modern standards the work was of a monstrous size... Where the orchid was concerned, Sander never spared himself, but even so, the care lavished on Reichenbachia still provokes astonishment....the technical standards would have been a tribute to any large printing house. The blocks were hand-made, out of wood; and the chromolithographs were produced by the use of as many as twenty inks. The cost to Sander was enormous, and it is said to have been well over £7000..." (A. Swinson, Frederick Sander: The Orchid King, 1970).

Cf. BM (NH) IV, p. 1800; cf.Great Flower Books (1990) p. 135; cf. Nissen BBI 1722; cf. Stafleu and Cowan TL2 10.219.