Five Catfish with Long Barbels, Antique Bertuch Print, circa 1815

This hand colored copper engraving of five catfishes, each with long trailing barbels, comes from the later Vienna edition of Friedrich Justin Bertuch's Bilderbuch. The fish range from a banded dark species with a broad head to a green catfish with red eyes and a slender striped eel like form at the foot.

The heading reads Fische LV and Poissons LV, and the mark at lower right reads XVIII.B.6. The five numbered figures are drawn in profile or from above, their whiskers colored in pink and their fins tinted in rose and olive. The catfishes are identified here at group level; their individual species names are not given because the text leaf is absent.

The later volumes of the Vienna edition, published in Vienna under the title Bilderbuch zum Nutzen und Vergnügen der Jugend, continued the reprint of Friedrich Justin Bertuch's Weimar Bilderbuch fuer Kinder in volumes of fifty plates each, with German and French headings in place of the three languages of the earlier plates. The Weimar original, the great illustrated encyclopaedia for children issued by the Landes Industrie Comptoir from 1790 onwards, was followed subject for subject, and the plates were sold colored by hand. The small mark at the foot, giving the Vienna volume and plate number, is what distinguishes these sheets from the Weimar issue. As a copper engraving colored by hand for a teaching book, it combines scientific ambition with a direct, appealing clarity. This sheet comes from Vienna volume XVIII, which places it circa 1813 to 1818.

A plate like this suits a kitchen, a dining room, a study or a coastal house, and it hangs well in a group with other Bertuch fish plates, where the color and the consistent format of the series make a lively and coherent wall.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with toning, faint show through of text from the reverse and a few small spots in the margins.

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