Species Riocreuxia picta

Alfred Riocreux (1820–1912), French artist and botanical illustrator. He was trained by his artist father, and showed precocious talent. His drawing and paintings as a 13-year-old were so good that the State Porcelain Factory at Sevres, where his father worked, considered conserving them. The botanist Adolphe Théodore Brongniart (1801–1876) saw his sketches and was probably responsible for bringing him to the Paris Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. TG Hill, author of The Essentials of Illustration (London, 1915), has described Riocreux’s work on seaweeds for a work by Gustave Thuret as ‘the finest plates ever published in a botanical work’, while the distinguished Dutch botanist FA Stafleu, writing in 1966, commented: ‘Riocreux was one of the great botanical artists of all time’.