Dishley Ram and Ewe of Haut-Tingry, Antique French Sheep Print, 1873

This antique sheep print shows a Dishley ram and ewe at the Bergerie du Haut-Tingry in the Pas-de-Calais, drawn and lithographed by F. Lehnert for the French agricultural album of the Vienna Exposition, 1873. The pair face one another in wooded pasture.

The Dishley, Bakewell's New Leicester, was the English mutton sheep the French imported to put weight on their own flocks. The plate sits beside the Dishley Merino cross in the album, and the two make a natural pair for collectors of English and French livestock history.

The sheet comes from the folio of maps, plans and drawings that the Direction de l'Agriculture of the French Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce assembled for its own exhibit at the Exposition Universelle held in Vienna in 1873, printed in Paris by the Imprimerie Nationale. The album gathered the statistical cartography, the model state farms, the breed portraits and the prize silver by which France meant to present its agriculture to the world. Its thematic maps belong to the first generation of printed statistical mapping, a field now collected for the history of data visualisation quite as much as for the history of farming.

The print is a lithograph, issued in 1873. It is uncolored. This antique sheep print would suit a farmhouse kitchen, a study or a country interior, and it will interest collectors of animal art, sheep breeding and the history of wool.

The sheet is in good condition, with age toning, scattered foxing and minor marginal marks. A faint stain is visible near the lower-right corner. The toning is the ordinary result of age rather than damage. Please see the images for a full view of the condition.

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