Featured on PDR in the collection William Sharp’s Chromolithographs of The Great Water Lily (1854)

These six magnificent colour lithographs are to be found in Victoria Regia, or, The Great Water Lily of America: With a Brief Account of its Discovery and Introduction into Cultivation (1854), a work by amateur botanist John Fisk Allen which documents his attempts to propagate the Amazon's Victoria regia (now called Victoria amazonica) in the more northerly climes of his hometown of Salem, Massachusetts. The wonderfully lavish plates accompanying the slim volume are the work of the British-born printer William Sharp, who is credited with creating the very first chromolithograph on American soil — a portrait of Reverend F. W. P. Greenwood. These images produced for John Fisk Allen's book are, according to Christies, the "very first colour-printed lithographs produced in America". Why they are…