Purple Currant - 50x70cm Poster

Vitis corinthiaca violacea - Violet Corinth Grape

The Violet Corinth Grape has fascinated for centuries with a botanical singularity: its perfect hermaphrodite flowers, equipped with all reproductive organs, invariably produce seedless fruits.

Poiteau, in his Pomologie Française, meticulously describes this enigma: five ovules per ovary, all destined to systematically abort. This programmed sterility makes this grape a textbook case for 19th-century botanists, and a delight for gourmets.

Much more developed than its white cousin, this grape variety is distinguished by its large, deep green leaves, cut into five toothed lobes and covered with a whitish down on the underside.

Its clusters, four to six inches long, hang from slender stems sometimes equipped with tendrils. The grapes, small and perfectly round, reach three to five lines in diameter when ripe. Exposed to the sun, they take on a translucent yellowish hue marbled with soft reddish-purple, covered with a slight whitish bloom. Their somewhat firm skin contains a juicy and pleasant flesh that takes on the color of the skin.

But this demanding grape requires warmth and patience: its late growth and tendency to shatter necessitate a full south espalier exposure. Fertile, a single vine is enough to supply a large household.

This plate is taken from Pierre-Antoine Poiteau and Pierre Jean François Turpin's Traité des Arbres Fruitiers, a botanical encyclopedia published between 1807 and 1835, a major reference for 19th-century naturalist illustration.

It combines the rigor of scientific drawing with a rare artistic sensibility, characteristic of the great plates from the golden age of illustrated botany.

Printing, material, shipping

• Each poster is printed with 12-color giclée printing, the benchmark for art studios for rendering fine tones, subtle gradients, and the most delicate botanical details.
• 200 g/m² paper, soft matte finish, 0.26 mm thick: a result close to the original engraving, sharp, without glare, designed for hanging.
• Printed on FSC-certified paper, printed individually to order.
• Shipped in a rigid protective tube.