Close-ups
Framed and on the wall
Frame and rooms are illustrations of how the print could look; the description says what is included.
Original Antique Print of Seven Robins, Bluethroats and Yellowthroats, 1796
$345 (£260, €310)
Period original, not a reproduction.
Shipped from the Netherlands, flat, insured and tracked, worldwide. Returns accepted within 14 days.
- Date
- 1796
- Size
- 9.4 × 7.7 in (24 × 19.5 cm)
- Condition
- Good. Wear consistent with age and use. Good. Wear consistent with age and use. General age-related toning with scattered foxing, spotting and minor marks. Some marginal wear and small edge irregularities. Original hand coloring remains strong and attractive.
- Period
- 18th century
- Artist or book
- Bertuch
- Section
- Birds
- Reference
- f_51424722
- Colour
- Hand coloured
What the condition grades mean
- Excellent
- Bright and clean, with no faults worth mentioning.
- Very good
- Only light signs of age, such as faint toning.
- Good
- Normal signs of age for a sheet of this period: toning, some foxing, small marks or neat old repairs.
- Fair
- Clear faults such as staining, tears or repairs, priced to match.
Every fault we see is written in the condition note, and the whole sheet is shown uncropped in the photos.
Seven small perching birds with red, blue and yellow throats, an original hand-colored copper engraving from Friedrich Justin Bertuch's Bilderbuch für Kinder, published in Weimar in 1796. The plate is lettered "Vögel XX" and "Oiseaux XX" at the top, with each bird numbered Fig. 1 to Fig. 7, and the engraver's signature is at the lower right. Bertuch's group heading is "Roth-, Blau- und Gelbkehlchen" (red-, blue- and yellow-throats).
The birds are arranged around the sheet, each on its own short branch. Several have the orange breasts of robins, two or three show a blue throat patch edged in white or orange, and one is yellow beneath with streaked wings. Colors range from brown and black through bright blue, yellow, orange and red. In the old description they include the common robin and American robin, the common and American bluethroat, and the yellowthroat, under eighteenth-century names such as Motacilla rubecula and Motacilla pensilis that no longer match modern species.
Bertuch (1747 to 1822) published the Bilderbuch für Kinder from 1790 as an illustrated encyclopedia for young readers, with hundreds of hand-colored plates on natural history, geography and technology.
