About this sheet
This is an original pair of antique hand colored lithographs from Schinz and Brodtmann's Naturgeschichte und Abbildungen der Saeugethiere, Zurich, 1824 to 1829, sold together as a pair and not available singly. The sheet shows a bull Asiatic elephant standing in profile on a strip of green ground, the great gray body modeled in soft lithographic tone, the ear, the folded trunk and the small eye drawn with care and the tusks showing short beneath the lip. The sheet shows a cow Asiatic elephant walking to the right with the trunk raised and curled, tuskless as the female of the species is, the hide drawn in long soft strokes of the crayon and the whole figure set on a band of green ground.
They are two original sheets sold together, and the set is never split. Both are original hand colored lithographs from Heinrich Rudolf Schinz's Naturgeschichte und Abbildungen der Saeugethiere, drawn on the stone and printed by Carl Joseph Brodtmann at Zurich between 1824 and 1829, and both carry the German common name and the Latin binomial lettered in script beneath the image.
Schinz and Brodtmann worked at the moment when lithography first made large natural history plates affordable, and the elephants are the showpieces of the mammal volumes. The sheet is lettered in German and Latin in the fine engraved script Brodtmann used throughout. This is the companion to the bull elephant earlier in the lot, lettered Das Weibchen and Foemina on the sheet to make the pairing explicit. Plates issued as a sexed pair are what a buyer of natural history material looks for, and these two have stayed together. A matched group hung together reads as one piece of furniture on a wall rather than as several small pictures, and because the sheets are the same size they frame identically and line up without compromise. Framed alike in plain dark moldings with equal mounts they suit a hall, a stair, a study or a dining room.
Even age toning throughout. Light foxing in the margins of both sheets. All corners complete on every sheet. Shallow nicks along an edge of one of the two sheets.
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.
