Antique Hippopotamus Print with Wild Boar and Babirusa, Kolb, circa 1890

This antique natural history print shows a hippopotamus, a domestic pig, a wild boar and a babirusa, an original plate from C. F. A. Kolb's Naturgeschichte der Säugethiere, published in Stuttgart by Hoffmann circa 1890. A hippopotamus with a mouthful of reeds dominates the center of a tropical river scene, a babirusa stands on a ledge to the right, and a wild boar and two domestic pigs occupy the foreground.

The sheet is lettered 1. Abtheilung and Säugethiere 10. Blatt at the head, and every animal is numbered and named beneath the image in German Fraktur with its Latin name, here Nilpferd, Hausschwein, Wildschwein and Hirscheber. Kolb's grouping of the hippopotamus with the pigs follows the older idea of the thick skinned animals, and the plate shows domestic and wild forms side by side.

Carl Friedrich August Kolb designed his Naturgeschichte der Säugethiere as an Anschauungs Unterricht für Schule und Haus, an object lesson for school and home, and the title page of this second edition announces 123 colored figures on 18 double folio plates together with 63 woodcuts in the text. The publisher was the Hoffmann'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung of Wilhelm Nübling in Stuttgart, and the plates were printed by color lithography, a process that allowed German publishers of the later nineteenth century to issue large, bright teaching images at a price schools and families could afford. Kolb arranged the mammals in systematic order across the series, so each sheet brings together related animals from several continents in a single imagined landscape. The babirusa of Sulawesi, with its curving upper tusks, is a rare subject on popular prints.

With its broad double page format and lively color, this chromolithograph suits a study, a library, a child's room or a natural history wall, and it can be grouped with other plates from the same series to build a set.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with light toning, a faint center fold as issued and a few small spots and faint offsetting in the margins; the image is clean.

This is an original antique print, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.