Royal Flycatcher and Bee-eaters, Antique Bertuch Print, Vienna, circa 1805

This antique bird print shows the royal flycatcher with its fan shaped crest, the black and red broadbill and several colorful bee-eaters, on an original hand colored plate from the Vienna edition of Bertuch's Bilderbuch headed Voegel LVIII.

Bertuch presented these as remarkable birds. The royal flycatcher, then called the beautiful flatbill, raises its spotted crest at upper left, while the broadbill opposite shows a heavy bill, black plumage and a rose pink breast and belly. Below them the European bee-eater with its yellow throat and a blue headed bee-eater with a rose breast lead a row of slender, long tailed birds with curved bills. The contrast between the heavy billed flatbills and the elegant bee-eaters makes a lively and colorful page.

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 VIII.B.1 places the sheet in volume 8 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. The plate is signed by Jacob Xaver Schmuzer, one of the Viennese engravers who worked on this edition. 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 faint pale stain in the center of the image; the color remains fresh and the image sound.

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