1770 · Birds, Plants & Natural History
Hand-Colored Engraving of the American Variegated Teal by Seligmann, ca.1770
$640
€570 · dollar price at today's exchange rate
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Shipping to the United States: $51 standard, $73 express, insured and tracked.
- Date
- 1770
- Kind
- Birds, Plants & Natural History
- Size
- 37 × 25 cm (14.6 × 9.8 in)
- Period
- Colonial America
- Reference
- BG-13981
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
A teal from the American coast, titled "Scheckiges americanisches Kriechentlein", in an original hand-colored copperplate engraving from Johann Michael Seligmann's Sammlung verschiedener ausländischer und seltener Vögel, Nuremberg, circa 1770. The plate is numbered "Tab. C" at the upper left and lettered below with the Latin "Querquedula Americana variegata", "N° 100 IV Theil" and the French "Sarcelle d'Amerique", with the credits "M. Catesby ad viv. delin." at the left and "J. M. Seligmann sculps. et excud." at the right.
The bird floats on a flat band of gray-blue water, in profile and facing right, with a faint ripple around its body. The head is a soft mauve with a white crescent behind the eye and a broad black stripe across the crown, and the bill is dark slate. The breast is scalloped in buff and brown, the back is dark with long pale streaks, and the folded wing shows a broad patch of mauve and a bar of green and white. One webbed foot dangles below the body beneath the surface, a feature of the pose.
The plate comes from the volumes in which Seligmann reissued Mark Catesby's drawings of Carolina and Bahamas wildlife, engraved by Seligmann himself and lettered in German, Latin and French for continental readers.
