Antique Prints between £0 and £0
Impressions on paper, framed or loose, made to hang on a wall: engravings, mezzotints, etchings, lithographs and woodblocks, sold singly and, very often, in pairs and sets.
What You're Looking At
The likeliest thing you'll meet under this heading is a framed British 19th-century engraving or coloured print, sold as a pair or a set. Of 1,310 listings, 330 say "prints" in the title, 211 say engraving, 169 say pair and 184 mention a frame. The 19th century is the biggest dated block by a distance.
Behind that sit several distinct groups. Georgian and 18th-century work runs to copper engravings, stipple portraits and mezzotints, with mezzotint in 53 titles and portraits the usual subject. Sporting, hunting and equestrian plates run right through the category, from modest single sheets to the top of the range. Vanity Fair "Spy" chromolithographs, Japanese woodblocks, and reverse glass prints and crystoleums each hold a small but steady share.
Dating is often a band rather than a year. 568 listings carry a clean year and the field spans 1700 to 1960, but 229 say only "19th Century", 120 only "18th Century", with Victorian and Georgian used as dates in their own right. A few plates carry a printed date in the title, and where title and field disagree, the title date is the one to read.
One thing worth knowing before you search: the heading takes in works on paper more broadly. 87 titles say painting, 74 watercolour and 48 oil, so drawings and paintings come up alongside true printmaking. Sellingantiques sees around 127 of these a year, listed by 217 different dealers.
Top And Bottom
A name in the title does more work than anything else. The highest-priced listings put a hand on the sheet, whether that's the artist behind the composition or the printmaker who cut the plate. The bottom of the range is the anonymous plate: "a 19th century print", an early Victorian botanical engraving, nothing named at all.
Completeness follows close behind. Sets of four, six, eight and twelve recur through the upper listings, and one Regency lot runs to 27 hand-tinted sheets; a single unattributed plate sits at the other end. Hand colouring lifts a print too, and 50 titles say so outright, on serpents, botanicals, waterfowl and monkey plates.
Then the marks of a personal touch and a proper setting. 48 titles say signed and 22 mention an edition, with pencil-signed impressions and artist's proof etchings clustering in the upper half. Period frames get named when they're worth naming, Hogarth, maple, rosewood, burr yew, walnut. Scale counts as well: "large" appears in 61 titles, most often on big 18th-century architectural and mythological engravings.
Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for prints 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.
About 127 antique prints are listed on Sellingantiques each year, and 217 different dealers have listed one.
Kunisada·Bartolozzi
The Antique Prints between £0 and £0 Glossary
- After
- The print reproduces another artist's composition rather than an original design by the printmaker. The word turns up in 142 titles, roughly one in ten.
- Engraving
- A line image cut into a metal plate and printed from it. The commonest process word in this category by a wide margin.
- Mezzotint
- A tonal intaglio process that gives deep blacks and soft gradations. It appears in 53 titles and is tied strongly to 18th-century portraits.
- Hand coloured
- Colour brushed on after printing rather than printed in. Fifty titles say so, and they sit well above plain impressions.
- Crystoleum
- A print mounted to glass, backed and coloured behind to imitate an oil painting. Spelled crystoleum and chrystoleum across the listings.
- Blind stamp
- An embossed publisher's or artist's mark pressed into the paper margin, cited on signed etchings and on Snaffles prints.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do prints come up in pairs and sets?
Publishers issued them that way, and the habit shows in the titles: 169 say pair, 84 say four, 29 say six.
Sets run larger still. Sets of eight and twelve recur, and one Regency lot runs to 27 hand-tinted sheets. Vanity Fair plates are sold as singles, as double-page sheets, and bound together in fours, sixes, nines, tens and twelves.
What is a Vanity Fair Spy print?
A caricature portrait printed as a chromolithograph, from stone rather than from a plate. Thirty-three titles carry the Vanity Fair name.
They appear singly and in multiples, which is why the same subject can turn up on its own one week and as part of a set of ten the next.
Are Japanese woodblocks part of this category?
Yes. Forty-nine titles say Japanese and 36 say woodblock, with 22 combining the two, and most sit in the 19th-century dated band.
Subjects include bijin figures, warriors, triptychs and botanicals. A triptych of the Gods of Fortune and two sets of botanical plates are among them.
How reliable are the dates given?
Take the title date over the field date. A handful of plates carry a hard printed year, 1745, 1794, 1811, 1843 among them, and those are the firmest dating in the category.
Elsewhere the field holds a band rather than a year. The dated range runs 1700 to 1960, with decade buckets covering the 20th-century material, and a few field dates sit oddly against their titles.
What are reverse glass prints and crystoleums?
Both put the image on glass rather than leaving it on paper. A reverse glass print is transferred and then painted from behind; a crystoleum is mounted to glass, backed and coloured to look like a painting.
Together they account for 36 titles, concentrated in the Georgian and Victorian bands, with royal portraits at the upper end.
Who is Snaffles?
A sporting caricaturist whose name appears in 61 titles, about four in every hundred, making him the single most repeated name in the category.
The work spans a wide range. Printed Christmas and greetings cards sit at the modest end, original watercolours at the very top.