Antique Iron Shield by Vechte with Lepage Moutier Pistols, 1852

About this sheet

This original antique chromolithograph of 1852 shows a great circular shield in iron by Antoine Vechte, flanked by two richly mounted pistols by Lepage Moutier of Paris. The shield fills the center of the sheet, embossed and chased with a crowded battle of figures that wheels around a central medallion, the whole drawn in silver gray so that the relief reads as sculpture. Two percussion pistols are laid across the corners, their barrels and locks inlaid in gold and silver and their stocks mounted with figures and animals. The lettering beneath names the sheet as A Shield in Iron designed by Vechte for Lepage Moutier of Paris, with L. H. Michael as draftsman, M. Digby Wyatt as director and J. A. Vinter as lithographer, and the imprint of the fifteenth of October 1852.

The plate comes from The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century, Matthew Digby Wyatt's record of the Great Exhibition of 1851, published in London by Day and Son, lithographers to the Queen, between 1851 and 1853 and dedicated by permission to Prince Albert. It was issued to subscribers in forty parts in printed paper wrappers, and the two volumes together carry about a hundred and sixty large folio plates. The project came from the publishers, who approached Wyatt soon after the exhibition opened wanting to show, on a large scale, what color printing could do for industrial education. Chromolithography was then new and costly, and each color on a sheet was printed from its own stone. Francis Bedford, John Sleigh, John Alfred Vinter and their colleagues drew and lithographed the plates under Wyatt's direction, and every plate carries its own imprint and date.

Antoine Vechte was a French metal chaser, celebrated in his own day, who worked in Paris and then in London, and the shields he raised and chased from a single plate of metal were among the show pieces of 1851. The Victoria and Albert Museum bought one of Vechte's shields from Lepage Moutier at the exhibition itself. Lepage Moutier were Paris gunmakers and the sellers of Vechte's shields. The sheet hangs well in a study, a library or a gun room, on its own or beside the Sheffield dagger plate from the same work.

Light age toning. A small cluster of brown spotting in the upper margin and a few spots at the foot. Handling wear to the upper left and lower right corners, with minor nicks along the right and bottom edges. The printed image is clean.

This is an original antique print, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed. Any framed or interior images are shown for presentation and inspiration only, unless the listing explicitly states that the item is sold framed.