Antique Botanical Art
Pictures of flowers and plants, from framed oil still lifes of cut blooms to watercolour studies and printed plates lifted from bound botanical works.
What Is Antique Botanical Art?
The heading covers a broad body of flower-and-plant pictures, and what dominates is the painted floral still life. "Still life" appears in 108 of 302 titles and "oil" in 103. Vases, jugs and baskets of cut flowers carry the category, with roses and mixed summer flowers the subjects that recur most.
Watercolour is the clear second body at 77 titles, covering flower studies, plant sheets and gouache work, sometimes both media on one sheet. Printed plates form the third strand: engravings run through 30 titles, with lithographs, hand-coloured impressions and a run of 1930s wood engravings alongside them. True single-specimen studies, one named plant on a plain ground, are a minority.
Two purposes sit behind all of it. Plants were recorded for herbals, florilegia and botanical periodicals, and from the eighteenth century engraved and hand-coloured plates put those images into wide circulation. Separately, the decorative flower piece grew out of the Netherlandish still-life tradition and carried on as domestic decoration.
Dealer dates run from 1750 to 1960, with 148 listings carrying a clean year. The largest single bucket is the broad "19th Century" at 55 listings, so much of the older material is placed by century rather than decade. Inter-war and mid-century work is well represented: the 1920s and 1930s each outnumber any single Victorian decade.
Where The Range Sits
A named artist with life dates in the title separates the upper reaches from the rest. Unattributed listings called simply "Botanical Watercolour" or "Oil on board" sit at the bottom of the sampled range. Ninety dealers have listed in this category on Sellingantiques and around thirty-three pieces come to market a year, so cataloguing habits vary from listing to listing.
Original painting outranks printed plate. Oils on canvas occupy most of the upper part of the sampled range, while engravings and lithographs cluster lower down, including a long run of identically titled early Victorian engravings. Support matters alongside medium: canvas and panels of mahogany, oak, porcelain and metal turn up at the higher end, board and paper more often below.
Sets and pairs are a habit of the category rather than an exception. "Pair" runs through 30 titles, groups of four, six, eight and ten all appear, and matched sets in matching frames are described as such. Scale pulls the same way, with "large" in 14 titles and sampled pieces described at seven feet.
Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for botanical art, calculated from the Sellingantiques database of over a million retail prices indexed since 2003. This retail price guide relies exclusively on Sellingantiques data; no external sources or auction records are used, so the figures do not describe the wider market.
The largest botanical work recorded on Sellingantiques by size is a verdure tapestry, 230 by 365cm.
The Antique Botanical Art Glossary
- Still life
- An arranged group of cut flowers, fruit or objects. The commonest subject in the category, named in 108 of 302 titles.
- Botanical study
- A picture of a single named plant or specimen rather than an arrangement. "Study" appears in 16 titles.
- Hand coloured
- A printed plate painted by hand after printing, said outright in nine titles.
- Engraving
- An intaglio print taken from an incised plate, and the dominant print term at 30 titles. Lithographs, from a drawn stone, cover much of the later nineteenth-century plate work.
- Gouache
- Opaque water-based paint, in eight titles, sometimes worked with watercolour on the same sheet.
- Pith paper
- Thin sliced plant pith used as a painting support for Chinese export flower and bird pictures, also listed as rice paper.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are these mostly scientific plant illustrations?
No. Painted flower still lifes outnumber single-specimen botanical work by a wide margin, with "still life" in 108 of 302 titles.
The scientific side is there in the printed plates, numbered illustrations taken from bound botanical works and usually sold framed and singly. They make up roughly one listing in eight.
What mediums turn up in this category?
Oil leads, in 103 titles, on canvas, board and panel. Watercolour is second at 77 titles, with gouache in eight.
Printed work covers engravings, lithographs and a run of 1930s mounted wood engravings. The samples also record oil on porcelain panel, oil on metal, oil on mahogany and oak, and gouache on silk.
How old is most of the material?
Dealer-supplied dates span 1750 to 1960. The largest single bucket is the broad "19th Century" at 55 listings, with 15 more given only as "Victorian".
The twentieth century is spread evenly across the decades from the 1900s to the 1960s. Eighteenth-century pieces are a handful in the samples, and one seventeenth-century attribution appears.
Do pairs and sets come up often?
Often enough to count as a habit. "Pair" runs through 30 titles, and groups of four, six, seven, eight and ten all appear, up to a set of ten academic sketch studies.
Matched sets in matching frames are described that way in listings, and they sit toward the top of the sampled range.
Is Chinese or Japanese work found here?
It is the rarest origin in the category, a small but consistent seam running through the titles.
The forms recorded are watercolours on pith and rice paper, gouache on silk, and Japanese botanical woodblock sets.
What subjects share the frame with flowers?
Fruit appears in 12 titles, and vases, jugs and baskets are the usual containers.
Insects, butterflies, birds' nests and shells recur often enough to count as a theme, with "bird" alone in 12 titles. Two one-off forms also turn up: a framed herbarium of pressed plant material, and a Regency cut-paper flower picture.