Henry Charles Andrews

Who was Henry Charles Andrews?

Henry Charles Andrews, was an English botanist, botanical artist and engraver.

He lived in Knightsbridge and was married to the daughter of John Kennedy of Hammersmith, a nurseryman who assisted Andrews in the descriptions of the plants he illustrated.

He was an accomplished and unusual botanical artist, in that he was not only the artist, but also engraver, colourist, and publisher in an era when most artists were only employed to draw plates. The Botanist's Repository was his first publication; issued serially in London in ten volumes between 1797 and 1812, the Repository at a half-crown an issue, provided affordable images of plants to the growing population of amateur gardeners in Britain. This was the first serious rival to the Kew publication, Curtis's Botanical Magazine. In retrospect the uneven quality and the inaccuracy of Andrews' 664 coloured plates, too imprecise for botanical use, drew critical comment from W. Botting Hemsley:

"The drawing is usually fairly good, though not equal to some of this artist's later work... There is no pretense of giving any analysis of the flowers, but they themselves are often inexact and generally inadequate to be of any use botantically. The descriptive part is also unequal, and synonymy altogether excluded. Nevertheless, the Repository was in one sense superior to the Botanical Magazine of that date, because the majority of the plants figured were of recent introduction."