Fossil paintings from Solnhofen - photo 1
Fossil paintings from Solnhofen - photo 2
Fossil paintings from Solnhofen - photo 3

Fossil paintings from Solnhofen

Starting price
$ 100
Auction dateClassic
27.01.2023 10:00UTC +01:00
Auctioneer
CHRISTIE'S
Event location
United Kingdom, London
Archive
The auction is completed. No bids can be placed anymore.
Archive
ID 887816
Lot 43 | Fossil paintings from Solnhofen
[KNORR, Georg Wolfgang, style or circle of]. Seven paintings of fossils, all but two from the famous Solnhofen Plattenkaeks in Bavaria. Bavaria, probably Nuremberg, c.1750.

Seven paintings in black chalk, watercolors and bodycolors, various sizes but average 360 x 230mm, on pen-and-wash bordered mounts. In a morocco-backed box with chemise.

Exceptional paintings of fossils from an eighteenth-century cabinet of curiosities. The scientific accuracy of the illustrations is outstanding, so much so that it is possible to identify all the genera and almost all the species depicted. The fossils themselves are from the Solnhofen limestone quarries in Bavaria, which were once an archipelago at the edge of the Tethys Sea. The deposits there date back to the Upper Jurassic, and were the site of the famous discovery of Archaeopteryx in 1861. The exception is the drawing of the slab of mussels, which hails from an even older Triassic-era deposit in Northern Germany known as Muschelkalk for its abundance of ancient shellfish.

These drawings are similar to the illustrations of Solnhofen fossils in Georg Wolfgang Knorr’s 1755 Sammlung and in the first volume of Knorr and Walsh’s 1768 Recueil des Monumens des Catastrophes que le globe terrestre a éssuiées,, but appear to be unpublished. They probably come from one of the "cabinets" which Knorr and Walsh drew upon for their work. The paintings are on paper with watermarks dated c. 1750, and depict:

1. Positive and negative halves of a fish, Leptolepides sprattiformis (Blainville 1818).
2. Positive and negative halves of a pair of elongated walking legs from the lobster Mecochirus longimanus.
3. Three lobsters, two being Eryon arctiformis and one being a Palinurina species.
4. Five lobsters, Eryma modestiformis and Mesochirus longimanus.
5. Positive and negative halves of two lobsters, Eryon arctiformis and Eryma modestiformis, and two shrimp, Antrimpos species.
6. Mussels, Hoernesia socialis, Middle Triassic, north Germany.
7. Calcite crystals on a shell matrix, no location.
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
8 King Street, St. James's
SW1Y 6QT London
United Kingdom
Preview
13.01.2023 – 27.01.2023
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