Produced by the Danish mycologist Jakob E. Lange from 1935-1940 in five volumes of 40 plates each, Flora Agaricina Danica is as thorough as it is beautiful. Lange illustrated nearly all of the species of Agricales pictured from life, often receiving more exotic mushrooms in the mail from colleagues. As he argued in his introduction, in doing all the work himself, the reader was freed from any questions of differing artistic styles that might complicate the comparison of different images.

This quest for objective accuracy and devotion to the subject carried through to the printing itself, chromolithography in its shaky infancy, which Lange supposedly supervised from start to finish, with obviously brilliant results. That the author died within a year of his opus' completion is no doubt in some part a testament to the labor involved in this project, and certainly a poetic close to a remarkable life.

You can view scans of the original drawings for this work, along with descriptions from the accompanying texts, on the website of the Botanical Museum at the University of Copenhagen: here.

The following scans are approximately 2-3mb each, scanned full size at 300dpi.