Antique Hand-Colored Crested Birds Engraving – Bertuch, c. 1800

Name: Antique Hand-Colored Crested Birds Engraving – Bertuch, c. 1800
Brand: American Maps and Prints
SKU: BG-14336-131
Price: 255 USD
Availability: InStock

$255

€230 · dollar price at today's exchange rate

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Shipping to the United States: $51 standard, $73 express, insured and tracked.

Date: 1800
Kind: Birds, Plants & Natural History
Size: 30 × 24 cm (11.8 × 9.4 in)
Condition: Good. Wear consistent with age and use. Good antique condition with overall age-related toning, scattered foxing and spotting, and minor marks and imperfections consistent with its age. The original hand coloring remains attractive and well preserved. Please study the photographs carefully.Seller Loca
Period: The Early Republic
Reference: BG-14336-131

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.

Guaranteed original. This is an original of the period stated, not a later reproduction or print-on-demand copy. If it is ever shown to be otherwise, we refund you in full.

Shipping to the United States. Sent from our gallery in Langweer, the Netherlands, flat between boards or rolled in a tube, and fully insured. Delivery and import charges.

About this piece

Five crested tropical American game birds on one plate, an original hand-colored copper engraving from Friedrich Justin Bertuch's Bilderbuch für Kinder, published in Weimar around 1800. The plate is lettered "Vögel CIV" and "Oiseaux CIV", and each bird is numbered Fig. 1 to Fig. 5, standing on its own small patch of grass.

They are curassows and guans, birds of the forests of Central and South America. At the center a blue-breasted bird with a dark back and a pointed crest has a red face and bill. Above it at the left stands a black bird with a curled crest and yellow bill, and at the right a gray-blue bird with a tall white-tipped crest and long blue tail. At the lower right a dark reddish-brown bird has a white-spotted crest and neck, and at the lower left a long-tailed bird with a bare pink throat and iridescent green and red wings. The old description names the genera as Mitu, Crax, Pipile and Penelope, under late eighteenth-century classifications that have since changed.

The coloring is strong in blues, greens, reds and pink, and the plate belongs to Bertuch's long series of natural-history plates for young readers.

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