Yellowhammer, Ortolan and Buntings, Antique Bertuch Print, Vienna, circa 1805

This antique bird print shows six European buntings, among them the yellowhammer and the ortolan, on an original hand colored plate from the Vienna edition of Bertuch's Bilderbuch headed Voegel LVII. It is a delightful study of small songbirds of fields and hedgerows.

The birds are the yellowhammer with its bright yellow head, the corn bunting, the reed bunting, the ortolan, the cirl bunting and the snow bunting, each perched on a twig and numbered for reference. The engraver has taken care over the streaked backs and the differences in head pattern, so the plate works both as a pretty picture and as a real identification aid, and the ortolan in particular had a long history in European cookery and folklore.

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 VII.B.46 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. 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, a few small spots and a small stain near the imprint; the image is otherwise clean.

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