The Amazon by August Kiss, Antique Great Exhibition Print, 1851

About this sheet

This original tinted lithograph of 1851 shows The Amazon, the sculptured group by the Berlin sculptor August Kiss that stood at the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace. A mounted Amazon, bare to the waist, twists in the saddle and drives her spear down at a panther that has sprung at her horse and sunk its claws into the animal's flank. The horse rears away from the attack while the rider keeps her seat and her aim. The plate is printed in tints rather than in full color, so the modeling of the sculpture reads as modeling and not as pattern, and the group sits inside an arched compartment on a plain ground. The lettering beneath names the sheet as The Amazon, by Kiss of Berlin, with M. D. Wyatt as director of the work and J. A. Vinter as draftsman and lithographer, and the imprint records publication on the fifteenth of September 1851.

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.

August Kiss worked in Berlin and modeled the group in the early 1840s; a bronze cast of it stands to this day in front of the Altes Museum there. This is plate 1, the opening sheet of Wyatt's work. In a dark molding with a generous mat it hangs well in a library, a hall or a study, and it sits comfortably beside prints of classical sculpture or of nineteenth century animal bronzes.

Complete sheet, all four corners present and the edges running straight. Light overall age toning. Scattered light foxing in the margins, heaviest across the top. The printed image itself is clean and strong.

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.