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

About this sheet

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.