Kitty Wake and Common Fern

Artist: Robert Mudie

Print Author: Robert Mudie

Date: 1835

Style: Original Antique Hand Coloured Engraved Print

Paper Size: Approximately 7.5" x 4.5" or 19cm x 11.5cm

Condition: Very good to excellent. Minor imperfections may be present due to age. Please examine the image carefully and contact us with any questions. 

Description:

Robert Mudie's prolific career began with this, the first in his series of natural history prints. Each volume combined engaging, expert text with delightful illustrations, and this one holds particular historical significance. It marked not only Mudie's first collaboration with George Baxter, inventor of a revolutionary colour printing method using multiple woodblocks, but also, as Max E. Mitzman notes in George Baxter and the Baxter Prints (p. 15), "the first colored illustrations ever attempted in a printed book."

Mudie himself acknowledged the importance of Baxter's innovation in his preface: "I should mention that the vignettes on the title pages are novelties, being the first successful specimen of what may be termed POLYCHROMATIC PRINTING, or printing in 'many colours' from wooden blocks… Baxter has, I believe, completed what was the last project of the great Bewick, but which that truly original and admirable genius did not live to accomplish" (pp. xii-xiii).  Baxter's technique, combining an intaglio steel plate (typically aquatint) for the image with color from up to twenty woodblocks, remains a landmark achievement.  The intaglio plate, with its capacity for fine, deeply inked lines, gave Baxter's prints a dramatic quality unmatched by pure chromoxylography or chromolithography.