Black Snake with Hummingbird, Antique Bertuch Print, Vienna, circa 1805

This antique snake print shows a black snake coiled round a young tree and a pale snake rising upright beside it, with a tiny hummingbird perched above, on an original hand colored plate from the Vienna edition of Bertuch's Bilderbuch headed Amphibien VI.

Unlike most of the reptile plates, this one is composed as a small scene, with a patch of ground, a leafy sapling and a crimson and green hummingbird at the top of the branch. The black snake spirals round the trunk with its red mouth open, and the sandy colored snake beside it rears up in regular waves, its head marked with three dark spots. The species named in Bertuch's text have not been confirmed, but the composition gives the plate real decorative charm.

The plate comes from the Vienna edition of Bertuch's Bilderbuch, published in Vienna under the title Bilderbuch zum Nutzen und Vergnuegen der Jugend. Its source is the celebrated Bilderbuch fuer Kinder, the picture book for children conceived and edited by Friedrich Justin Bertuch in Weimar, whose plates were engraved afresh by Viennese engravers for this edition. Most plates carry their subject class and number in German, Latin and French across the top, so that the work could teach languages as well as natural history. Here the heading belongs to the series of amphibians, a class in which Bertuch, following the naturalists of his day, grouped snakes, lizards, crocodiles, frogs and even seals. The small engraved mark IV.B.25 places the sheet in volume 4 of the Vienna edition, one of the volumes issued in Vienna in the first years of the nineteenth century.

It is a copperplate engraving, colored by hand with watercolor in the manner of the Weimar original. The plate is signed by Jacob Xaver Schmuzer, one of the Viennese engravers who worked on this edition. Bertuch drew his images from the best natural history books of his time, and the result is a lively, accessible record of how the natural world was understood around 1800. Single plates from the Bilderbuch are popular with collectors of antique natural history prints, and a group of related plates makes a handsome display in a study, library or hallway.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with light toning and a few spots in the margins; the image itself is clean and the color fresh.

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