Antique Engravings between £0 and £0
A sheet of paper printed from an incised metal plate, sold framed, mounted or loose, with the subject and the artist behind it named in the title.
What Are Antique Engravings?
Printing from an incised metal plate began in fifteenth-century Europe and became the standard way of multiplying an image, whether an original design or a copy of a painting, before photography arrived. Hand colouring and tonal methods such as mezzotint and stipple widened what a single plate could give.
Under this heading the word engraving is used across the whole intaglio family. Line engraving, stipple, mezzotint, etching, aquatint, drypoint and wood engraving all appear, along with a scattering of lithographs and a few maps. Named processes trail the generic term: mezzotint, etching and stipple each show up in only a small run of titles.
What you'll meet most often is a single or paired 18th- or 19th-century print of a named subject, commonly hand-coloured and framed. Multiples are close to the habit of the category rather than the exception, with pairs, fours and sixes all recurring, and one sampled title running to twenty-seven Regency hand-tinted prints. Roughly one listing in five is a reproductive print after a painter rather than an original design.
Beyond that, a handful of clusters repeat. Mezzotint portraits of titled sitters. Hand-coloured natural history and botanical plates covering birds, fish, insects, monkeys, serpents, shells and skulls. Large architectural plates from the Antiquities of Athens. And a small 1930s tail of wood engravings, mounted as individual leaves from a single 1935 book, Four Hedges. Around 77 come up on Sellingantiques a year, from 153 different dealers.
What Sets Them Apart
Number of sheets does more than anything else. Single sheets sit at the bottom of the range and sets hold the top: four Stubbs racehorse engravings, twelve bird plates by Eleazar Albin, eight Wandelaar skeletons, four coloured plates of Raphael's Loggia. A pair carries more weight than two singles ever would.
Attribution is the second lever. The strongest titles name both sides of the job, the painter who made the design and the engraver who cut the plate, in the form "by James Watson after". The plainest are simply "Antique Engraving" or "Early Victorian Botanical Engraving", with nobody named at all.
After that it comes down to colour, scale and frame. Hand colouring runs through the upper end, particularly on botanical, bird and serpent sets. Long panoramic sheets and plates described as large or massive carry well, one being a minuet danced at Bath. Titles that specify an original frame, a Hogarth frame, burr maple, rosewood or giltwood sit above those offered mounted.
Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for engravings between £0 and £0, calculated from the Sellingantiques database of over a million retail prices indexed since 2003. This retail price guide relies exclusively on Sellingantiques data; no external sources or auction records are used, so the figures do not describe the wider market.
Plates from the Antiquities of Athens keep reappearing on Sellingantiques. Athens is named in twenty-six engraving titles, with James Basire in nineteen of them.
Bartolozzi
The Antique Engravings between £0 and £0 Glossary
- After
- The print reproduces a design by the named artist, who didn't cut the plate himself. It appears in a large run of titles, often as "after Sir".
- Engraved by
- The person who actually cut the plate, credited separately from the designer. Titles naming both sit at the top of the range.
- Hand coloured
- Colour applied by brush after printing rather than printed. Common on the botanical and natural history plates.
- Mezzotint
- A tonal intaglio process worked from dark to light, used heavily for the portraits in this category.
- Plate
- Both the metal sheet the image was printed from and the numbered image taken from a book or series.
- Hogarth frame
- A black moulded frame with a gilt slip, named after the printmaker and much used on prints of this kind.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do so many listings say 18th century with no year?
Only 236 of 840 listings carry a clean year, so most dating here is done by period label rather than by date. Titles reading "18th Century" or "19th Century" are best read as a bracket.
The dated field runs 1700 to 1960. The 18th century is the largest single label, followed by the 19th, with a further group given only as "1800s".
What does after mean in an engraving title?
It means the print reproduces a design by the named artist, who didn't cut the plate. Reynolds, Hogarth, Kauffman, Morland, Claude Lorrain, Rubens and Raphael all recur as source names.
About a fifth of titles use it, and those prints make up a much larger share of the top of the range, especially where the engraver is named too.
Are engravings usually sold singly or in sets?
Both, but multiples are close to the norm. "Pair" appears in 101 titles, "four" in 56 and "six" in 26.
The largest group recorded in a single sampled title is a set of twenty-seven Regency hand-tinted prints. Sets and long panoramic sheets hold the top of the range.
Which subjects come up most often?
Portraits of titled sitters, largely as mezzotints. Hand-coloured natural history: birds, fish, insects, monkeys, serpents, shells and skulls. And large architectural plates, with 26 titles mentioning Athens and 24 "antiquities".
Cries of London is the most repeated single subject in the samples, turning up in five separate listings in different editions and set sizes.
Do wood engravings appear under this heading?
Yes. Wood engraving is cut into the end-grain of a block and printed in relief, so it isn't intaglio, but it's catalogued here all the same.
A tight 1930s group accounts for most of them, seventeen titles referring to wood engravings from a single 1935 book, Four Hedges, each a mounted individual leaf. They sit at the bottom of the range.
What unusual forms turn up in this category?
Reverse engravings on glass, prints under verre eglomise and hand-coloured optical prints all appear once or twice and nowhere else.
So does a run of anatomical plates, skulls, skeletons and a rhinoceros skeleton among them. An engraved wine glass has been filed with the prints.
A few lithographs and maps sit under the heading as well.