Yellow Crucifer and Slender Flowering Herb, Antique Bertuch Print, circa 1805

This antique botanical print comes from the Vienna edition of Bertuch's Bilderbuch and shows two flowering herbs under the heading Pflanzen XLV, with the Vienna mark IV.B.27. The species are not yet established and the plate is described here from what it shows.

Figure 1 is a plant of the cabbage family with deeply lobed, wavy leaves, some tinted brown, and heads of small yellow four petalled flowers. Figure 2 is a tall slender stem with narrow willow like leaves and loose sprays of tiny rounded flowers touched with orange. The pairing may be a plate of dye or useful plants, but this has not been confirmed.

Friedrich Justin Bertuch (1747 to 1822) began his Bilderbuch fuer Kinder in Weimar in 1790 as a picture encyclopaedia for young readers, and over four decades it grew to almost 1,200 plates on plants, animals, peoples, antiquities and the sciences. Its success led to other editions, and this sheet comes from the Vienna edition published by Anton Pichler as the Bilderbuch zum Nutzen und Vergnuegen der Jugend, with text in German and French. The Vienna plates were newly engraved after the Weimar originals, keep the Weimar subject numbering in a heading in German, Latin and French, and carry a volume and plate number in the lower margin, here the mark IV.B.27. Vienna volume IV follows Weimar volume II, which appeared in 1795 to 1796, so this plate was published no earlier than that. The plate is a copper engraving with original hand color, as the Vienna volumes were issued colored.

A plate like this suits a kitchen, study or garden room, and it hangs well in a group with other Bertuch botanical sheets of the same size. For a collector it is also a neat example of how the Bilderbuch traveled beyond Weimar in the years around 1800.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with light toning and faint spotting mostly confined to the margins; the botanical image is clean and well colored.

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