William Henry Prestele

Wilhelm Heinrich Prestele (or William Henry Prestele) (13 October 1838 – 16 August 1895) was a botanical artist known for his lithographs and watercolor work commissioned by the US Department of Agriculture.

Prestele was born on October 13, 1838, in Hesse-Darmstadt, Germany, to Franz Joseph Martin Prestele and Karoline Russ. The family emigrated to America in 1843, settling first in New York and later in the Amana Colonies in Iowa. His father, known in America as Joseph Prestele, was also a painter and lithographer of flowers and fruits and prior to emigrating had been head gardener for King Ludwig I of Bavaria as well as a staff artist for a time at the Royal Botanical Garden in Munich. From his father he learned the arts of watercolor and lithography.

In the late 1850s, Prestele moved to New York, and in 1861 he joined the Union Army as a private in a regiment of New York volunteers. He was wounded at the battle of Antietam in 1862 and spent the remainder of his service period recovering in hospital. Sometime around 1863, he married an Irish woman named Anne, and with her he had three children—Margaret (1864), Frances (ca. 1869), and Emma (1870)—before Anne died in 1871 or 1872.

In 1867, at the age of 29, William was hired to make a series of nurserymen’s plates by Illinois nursery owner Franklin Kelsey Phoenix. He moved his family from New York to Bloomington, Illinois, for this project. No plates from this project are known to have survived, but a write-up in the August 1869 edition of Gardener's Monthly and Horticultural Advertiser praised them in robust terms: "We have now before us a fruit piece... prepared by W. H. Prestele. We are in the habit of admiring European art in this line, and have often wished Americans could successfully compete with it. We now have it here. We never saw anything of the kind better executed from any part of the world".

When this relationship ended in 1871, William briefly went into business with L. B. Littlefield, publishing fruit and flower plates. In 1875, he moved his family to Iowa, not far from the Amana community where he was raised, and married his second wife, Susanna Gefaller. With Susanna, who died in 1882, he had a daughter, Lillian. He set up as a lithographer in Iowa City and practiced this trade for a decade or so.

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