French Agricultural Show Trophies, Antique Silverware Print, 1873

This antique silverware print shows the prize silver and objets d'art of the French regional agricultural shows, drawn and lithographed by V. Rose for the French agricultural album of the Vienna Exposition, 1873. Seven pieces of prize silver and bronze are ranged on two shelves and captioned individually: the Hanap, the Prix d'honneur des Volailles, the group called Union des forces, the Prix d'ensemble des betes bovines, a victorious Ceres, the Nouvelle Coupe de la Prime d'honneur and Travail et Science.

It is a sheet for the silver collector quite as much as the agricultural one, and a good record of French exhibition metalwork in the Second Empire manner.

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 silverware print would suit a dining room, study or library, and it will interest collectors of silver and decorative arts as well as of French agricultural history.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with general age-related toning, light foxing and faint staining, mainly in the margins. There is minor creasing and edge wear. The printed image remains clear and well preserved. 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.