Five Exotic Birds, Antique Bertuch Print, Vienna, circa 1805

This antique bird print from the Vienna edition of Bertuch's Bilderbuch shows five colorful exotic birds, an original hand colored copperplate engraving headed Voegel LXXIV. The specific species on the plate are not yet established and are being checked against Bertuch's text.

The birds include a soft blue bird, two black headed birds with yellow and dark plumage that may be orioles or troupials, a gray bird with a speckled crest, and at the center a green and rose bird with a long, fanned tail in dark and pale blue. Each is perched on a short branch against the plain ground, so the plate reads as a lively sampler of the brilliant birds that travelers were bringing back to Europe.

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 birds, which Bertuch treated as one of the richest subject classes of the whole work. The small engraved mark X.B.36 places the sheet in volume 10 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. 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 tiny spots; the image is clean, bright and well preserved.

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