1836 · Views & Engravings
Portraits of Inhabitants of Northwest America by Karl Joseph Brodtmann, 1836
$300
€270 · dollar price at today's exchange rate
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Shipping to the United States: $51 standard, $73 express, insured and tracked.
- Date
- 1836
- Kind
- Views & Engravings
- Size
- 32.5 × 26 cm (12.8 × 10.2 in)
- Period
- The Early Republic
- Reference
- BG-13176-7
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
Two portraits of men from Northwest America, an original lithograph credited to Karl Joseph Brodtmann, 1836, printed in black and gray tints. The sheet is numbered "Pl. 17" at the upper right and lettered "Bewoners van Noordwest-Amerika" (inhabitants of Northwest America) beneath the images.
The upper portrait shows a man in a broad, conical woven hat banded with a stepped geometric design and tied at the chin. He wears a fringed or woven cape across his shoulders, and small ornaments pierce his nose and lip. Below, a second man is shown to the chest, with long dark hair parted at the center, a ring through the septum of his nose and a long pale ornament hanging from his ear. A cord with a looped fastening crosses his bare shoulder.
Brodtmann, a Swiss lithographer (1787 to 1862), is known for this kind of ethnographic and natural-history plate. The heads are rendered in fine crayon-style shading, a hallmark of early lithography, and each figure fills the page against bare paper. Portraits of this kind give a European view of the Pacific Northwest Coast peoples in the early nineteenth century, and the hat and ornaments are the features the draftsman has chosen to record most carefully.
