About this sheet
This antique botanical print from Bertuch's Bilderbuch shows two Asian spice plants, cassia cinnamon and galangal. The heading reads Pflanzen XCI, the Weimar plate of foreign spices, and the Vienna mark IX.B.8 is engraved at lower right.
Figure 1 is the cassia or Chinese cinnamon, called Mutterzimmt in German, with strongly ribbed leaves, dark purple berries seated in green cups, a red seed at C and a rolled quill of the aromatic bark at D. Figure 2 is galangal, a relative of ginger, with a spray of white flowers, red fruit, small flowers at A and the knobbly rhizome at b that is used as a spice. Both were long traded along the routes from South and East Asia to Europe, and the plate makes a handsome picture for a kitchen or dining room.
Friedrich Justin Bertuch (1747 to 1822) began his Bilderbuch fuer Kinder in Weimar in 1790 as a picture encyclopaedia for young readers, and over four decades it grew to almost 1,200 plates on plants, animals, peoples, antiquities and the sciences. Its success led to other editions, and this sheet comes from the Vienna edition published by Anton Pichler as the Bilderbuch zum Nutzen und Vergnuegen der Jugend, with text in German and French. The Vienna plates were newly engraved after the Weimar originals, keep the Weimar subject numbering in a heading in German, Latin and French, and carry a volume and plate number in the lower margin, here the mark IX.B.8. Vienna volume IX follows Weimar volume V, which appeared in 1805, so this plate was published no earlier than that. The plate is a copper engraving with original hand colour, as the Vienna volumes were issued coloured.
A plate like this suits a kitchen, study or garden room, and it hangs well in a group with other Bertuch botanical sheets of the same size. For a collector it is also a neat example of how the Bilderbuch travelled beyond Weimar in the years around 1800.
The sheet is in good condition for its age, with light toning and minor wear at the right edge; the image itself is clean and well preserved.
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.
