Garden Tiger Moth and Emperor Moth, Antique Bertuch Print, Vienna, circa 1805

This antique moth print shows the garden tiger moth and the small emperor moth, together with what is probably the goat moth, each with its caterpillar and pupa, on an original hand colored plate from the Vienna edition of Bertuch's Bilderbuch headed Insecten XXIV.

Each moth is shown as a small life history. At the top the garden tiger spreads its cream and brown forewings and red hindwings spotted with blue black, above its hairy woolly bear caterpillar and dark pupa. In the middle a gray, finely marked moth is shown with a reddish, segmented larva and a yellow pupa, and at the bottom the small emperor moth displays its four eye spots above a green, bristly caterpillar. The plate made the metamorphosis of insects easy for children to follow.

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 insects, a class that allowed the engravers to show exotic butterflies, moths and beetles in striking color. The small engraved mark VII.B.29 places the sheet in volume 7 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, scattered foxing mostly in the margins and small stains at the lower corners; the figures themselves are clean and well colored.

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