Antique Horse and Zebra Print with the Extinct Quagga, Kolb Mammals, circa 1890

This antique natural history print shows a horse, a donkey with foal, a plains zebra, a mountain zebra and a quagga, an original plate from C. F. A. Kolb's Naturgeschichte der Säugethiere, published in Stuttgart by Hoffmann circa 1890. A bay horse stands at the center of the landscape, flanked by a donkey and foal, two zebras in the foreground, a mountain zebra on the slope and a quagga beneath a tree on the left.

The sheet is lettered 1. Abtheilung and Säugethiere 11. Blatt at the head, and every animal is numbered and named beneath the image in German Fraktur with its Latin name, here Pferd, Esel, Zebra, Bergzebra and Quagga. The last known quagga died in Amsterdam in 1883, so this plate records the animal at almost exactly the moment it disappeared, alongside the familiar horse and donkey.

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 quagga, a partly striped zebra of southern Africa, became extinct in the 1880s, which gives its appearance here real historical interest.

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 marginal spots; the image is clean and bright.

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