Stags Stitched (As Issued)
RIDINGER, Johann Elias.
[A Book of Stags.] Six engravings of deer by Henry Roberts after Ridinger. [London,] Robert Sayer, [1770s?].
Six engravings, each c. 254 × 198 mm (plate size 178 × 153 mm), with engraved captions below; Sayer’s imprint on the first (‘A Fallow Deer Couching in Cover’), numbered at the head in the plates 58 to 63 (but complete); in very good condition, partly untrimmed, stitched at the head as issued.
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[A Book of Stags.] Six engravings of deer by Henry Roberts after Ridinger.
A rare and attractive drawing-book, likely the ‘Book of Stags, after Ridinger, and engraved by Roberts’ listed among the one-shilling quarto ‘Drawing Books’ in Sayer and Bennet’s Enlarged Catalogue of 1775. They were first issued by Roberts as A New Book of Stags (one copy recorded at Yale Center for British Art, wrongly dated c. 1730), the title burnished out and the imprint re-engraved.
The Augsburg painter and engraver Johann Ridinger (1698–1767) was one of the foremost German artists specialising in horses and hunting scenes in his day; his own publishing house issued some 1600 prints, and his designs were often employed by decorative artists and in the porcelain industry. The plates here are copies in reverse of plates from Ridinger’s Entwurff einiger Thiere (1738–40), and include ‘A Fallow Deer Unharboured’, ‘A Stag at Bay’, and ‘The Death of the Stag’. Henry Roberts (1710–1790) was a talented engraver, and a publisher of prints in his own right. His renditions capture much of the spirit and energy of the originals.