Thrushes, Blackbird and Ring Ouzel, Antique Bertuch Print, Vienna, circa 1805

About this sheet

This antique thrush print shows seven European thrushes, including the blackbird and the ring ouzel, on an original hand coloured plate from the Vienna edition of Bertuch's Bilderbuch headed Voegel XXXV. It is a charming study of familiar garden and woodland birds.

The plate brings together the mistle thrush, the fieldfare, the redwing and the song thrush with their speckled breasts, the male and female blackbird, and the ring ouzel with its pale crescent across the chest. Each bird stands on a small mossy mound or twig, so the different sizes, spotting and colours can be compared at a glance, exactly as Bertuch intended for young readers learning to recognise the birds of their own countryside.

The plate comes from the Vienna edition of Bertuch's Bilderbuch, published in Vienna under the title Bilderbuch zum Nutzen und Vergnuegen der Jugend. Its source is the celebrated Bilderbuch fuer Kinder, the picture book for children conceived and edited by Friedrich Justin Bertuch in Weimar, whose plates were engraved afresh by Viennese engravers for this edition. Most plates carry their subject class and number in German, Latin and French across the top, so that the work could teach languages as well as natural history. Here the heading belongs to the series of birds, which Bertuch treated as one of the richest subject classes of the whole work. The small engraved mark V.B.30 places the sheet in volume 5 of the Vienna edition, one of the volumes issued in Vienna in the first years of the nineteenth century.

It is a copperplate engraving, coloured by hand with watercolour in the manner of the Weimar original. The plate is signed by Jacob Xaver Schmuzer, one of the Viennese engravers who worked on this edition. Bertuch drew his images from the best natural history books of his time, and the result is a lively, accessible record of how the natural world was understood around 1800. Single plates from the Bilderbuch are popular with collectors of antique natural history prints, and a group of related plates makes a handsome display in a study, library or hallway.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with light toning and faint marks in the left margin; the image 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.