This plate of roses is one of the most famous from Robert John Thornton’s ‘Temple of Flora’, which is undoubtedly the one of the finest English botanical plate book ever produced. It is also the only plate coloured by Thornton himself. It was first issued in parts between the years 1799 and 1807 then as a book in 1807 before the famous lottery edition in 1811. The work was intended as a pictorial celebration of the sexual system of Linnaeus and was accompanied by prose and verse. Thornton (1768-1837) employed the finest artists, engravers, printers, and colourists including Peter Henderson and Philip Reinagle. Each plate places the plant in an exotic and romantic setting. The mezzotint engraving was done by Robert Dunkarton, Richard Earlom, and William Ward, and the aquatint work by Joseph Constantine Stadler and Thomas Sutherland. Abraham Pether contributed the ‘moon-light’ for this particular plate of the night-blowing cereus. Its production exhausted his fortune and he turned to Parliament for permission to run a lottery to pay his debts. Dunthorne (1938) 301; Grigson and Buchanan (1951); Mackenzie (1998); Sitwell & Blunt (1990) ‘Great Flower Books’ (1956) p. 77; Tomasi (1997) pp. 354-8.