Four Kingfishers on Branches, Antique Bertuch Print, Vienna, circa 1818

This antique kingfisher print shows four brightly colored kingfishers and a fifth, heavier billed bird on bare branches, an original hand colored plate from the Vienna edition of Bertuch's Bilderbuch. The heading reads Voegel XCVIII and Oiseaux XCVIII, marking it as one of the later bird plates of the series.

The kingfishers are shown in profile with their long dagger shaped bills, turquoise and blue backs and warm orange underparts, one of them with a strongly barred crown. The central bird, numbered as figure five, has a short heavy bill and brown and orange plumage and is probably a puffbird, a tropical relative that naturalists of the period often discussed alongside the kingfishers. The arrangement on a plain ground lets each bird read clearly, which is typical of the Bilderbuch.

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 XVIII.B.16 places the sheet in volume 18 of the Vienna edition, which corresponds to the ninth volume of the Weimar original, dated 1816, 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 light toning and a few spots; the left margin is trimmed close to the title, and the image is otherwise clean.

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