Original Antique Hand-Colored Fern Engraving, Aspidium palustre, 1806-1809

This original antique hand-colored copper engraving of Aspidium palustre is plate 30 from Christian Schkuhr's survey of the ferns and fern allies, printed at Wittenberg between 1806 and 1809. Aspidium is Schkuhr's name for the shield ferns, the group that later botanists split into Dryopteris, Polystichum and their relatives. The sheet is lettered Aspidium palustre beneath the figure, in the engraved script Schkuhr used throughout the work, and the plate number is engraved at the upper right. Beside the habit drawing Schkuhr adds the small lettered analyses he is known for, the spore cases, the scales and the sections that make the plate useful to a botanist as well as pleasant to look at.

This is one of the 221 copper plates of Christian Schkuhr's volume on the cryptogamic plants, the ferns, club mosses, horsetails and water ferns that stand as the twenty-fourth class of the Linnaean system. Schkuhr drew the plants, cut the plates and published the work himself at Wittenberg, issuing it in nine parts between 1806 and 1809. The bibliography records it at Pritzel 8205, and the first impressions were printed on bluish paper, as this sheet is.

This is an engraving on copper with original hand coloring, printed on the bluish paper that the first impressions of the work were issued on. The engraved line carries the structure and the watercolor carries the color, applied by hand so that no two copies of the plate are quite alike. Hung singly the plate makes a calm, graphic statement; grouped with others from the same volume it makes a wall. The uniform sheet size and the shared palette mean these plates frame and group easily, which is how most buyers use them, in a study, a bedroom, a garden room or a professional office.

Light uneven toning, browner towards the edges. Marked handling soiling along all four edges. Slight wear at the bottom right corner.

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