Five Exotic Lizards, Antique Bertuch Print, Vienna, circa 1820

This antique lizard print shows five exotic lizards in a landscape format, on an original hand colored plate from the Vienna edition of Bertuch's Bilderbuch headed Amphibien XLIII, one of the later reptile plates.

The lizards include a large dark lizard speckled with white and a very long tail, a smaller lizard with red spots, a slender blue striped lizard, a green lizard with a low crest and banded tail, and a gray lizard with a broad head and a crest along its back. The species named in Bertuch's text have not yet been confirmed. The horizontal layout, used in the later volumes, gives the lizards room to stretch out their tails across the sheet.

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 XIX.B.22 places the sheet in volume 19 of the Vienna edition, which corresponds to the tenth volume of the Weimar original, dated 1818, so this Vienna plate cannot be earlier than that.

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 even toning, a brown stain in the lower left margin and small binding holes at the lower edge, clear of the image.

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