A bouquet of Bourbon roses

A noted pupil of Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759-1840) and Jan Frans van Daël (1764-1840), Elisabeth-Emile Lemire, née Navarre, had a 'fine decorative flair and freshness of colour' (E. Hardouin-Fugier, The Pupils of Redouté, London, 1981, p. 27). She was both a musician and a painter, exhibiting her floral watercolours at the Paris Salon in 1836, 1841, 1848 and 1854. In 1836, she married Adrian Célestin Sauvage, called 'Le Mire', a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique.

A bouquet of Mixed dahlias by Lemire is at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (inv. PD.755-1973) and a similar bouquet of flowers painted on vellum, with a white background, is illustrated in E. Hardouin-Fugier and E. Grafe, French Flower Painters of the 19th Century, London, 1989, p. 264.

The Bourbon Rose, a natural hybrid, was first discovered on the Île de Bourbon, where the inhabitants enclosed their land with hedgerows made of two species of roses, the Common China Rose and the Autumn Damask. The hybrid rose that was created was quickly propagated by Jean Nicolas Bréon (1785-1864), the curator of the Botanic Gardens in Paris. In 1822 he sent seeds to the French Royal Gardener and the Bourbon Rose, a robust and fragrant flower, with many petals and a globular head, soon became widely distributed throughout France.