Garden Parsley

Name: Garden Parsley
Brand: Cabinet of Curiosities
SKU: PA-00254

Elizabeth Blackwell, 1737–1739

Cabinet of CuriositiesPA-00254Tear sheet

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No print size passed the check for this piece: at 8 x 10 in, Wrong shape: a 13% crop. We would rather show it than sell a soft print.

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Elizabeth Blackwell drew, engraved, and hand-colored every one of the 500 plates in A Curious Herbal (1737–1739) herself — a feat undertaken to raise the money to free her husband from debtors' prison, working from live specimens at London's Chelsea Physic Garden with its curators checking each plate for botanical accuracy. Garden Parsley, a kitchen herb familiar enough to seem an unlikely subject for heroics, is rendered with the same unadorned precision she gave every plant: root, stem, leaf, flower head, and seed, each labeled and separated for clear identification, no landscape or ornament to distract from the specimen itself. What to notice: this plain, functional style was a deliberate choice — apothecaries used A Curious Herbal as a working reference to identify medicinal plants, and Blackwell's uncluttered plates were built to be legible first, beautiful second.

Maker: Elizabeth Blackwell
Date: 1737–1739
Medium of the original: Plate
Original held by: Wikimedia Commons
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Rights: Public domain, verified
Catalogue number: PA-00254

Before a size goes on sale, the file is measured against it: pixels per inch at that size, how much of the picture a crop would lose, tone and sharpness. A size that fails is not offered, so there is nothing to choose wrong.

How the print check works

Sizes withheld
Size	Why
8 x 10 in	Wrong shape: a 13% crop
8 x 12 in	137 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
11 x 14 in	Wrong shape: a 12% crop
12 x 16 in	95 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
12 x 18 in	91 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
16 x 20 in	Wrong shape: a 13% crop
16 x 24 in	68 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
18 x 24 in	63 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
20 x 30 in	54 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
24 x 30 in	Wrong shape: a 13% crop
24 x 36 in	45 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
30 x 40 in	38 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
36 x 48 in	31 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged
40 x 60 in	27 dpi; a historical scan is never enlarged

Scanned

2026-10-07

Master file

1,140 x 1,644 px, srgb, Adobe RGB (1998)

Tone

Darks 58, lights 255 of 255; 72.7% clipped light, 0.6% clipped dark

Colour

0% vivid

Sharpness

67.71

Notes

Colour profile Adobe RGB (1998), converted to sRGB for the screen and the print
Pure white on 73% of the image, mostly the sheet itself: it prints as the paper's white

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