• Title : Le Jabiru, de Cayenne
• Size: 12in x 9in (305mm x 230mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1775
• Ref #:  23505

Description:
This beautifully hand coloured original copper-plate engraved antique print was published in the 1775 Imperial quatro edtion of Comte de Buffons Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (Natural History, General and Particular, with a Description of the King\'s Cabinet)
These prints are rare produced for a limited release of Histoire Naturelle with both the engraving and hand colouring done under the supervision of the French naturalist. Edme-Louis Daubenton and engraved by the famous French engraver Francois Nicolas Martinet.

A deluxe edition of Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1771–1786) was produced by the Imprimerie royale in 10 folio and quarto volumes, with 1008 engraved by Francois Nicolas Martinet
and hand-coloured plates, executed under Buffons personal supervision by Edme-Louis Daubenton, cousin and brother-in-law of Buffons principal collaborator.

Francois Nicolas Martinet was a French engraver and draughtsman. In 1756, he was working for the court of France as Graveur du Cabinet du Roi, under the auspices of the Menus Plaisirs du Roi, making engravings after drawings by others of such subjects as the May Ball at Versailles during the Carnival of 1763. In the same period, Martinet produced illustrations for plays or comic operas by such contemporaries as Marmontel, Voltaire and Philidor. Some of these he engraved himself, while others were drawn by him but engraved by his sister Thérèse Martinet (born c. 1731). He is best known for his engravings of birds for Comte de Buffon\'s, Histoire Naturelle Des Oiseaux published in Paris from 1770-86. In 1768, a comprehensive group of natural history studies drafted by Martinet, and engraved by Robert Bénard were included in the natural history volume of Diderot and Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Martinet also drew and engraved portraits, landscapes and genre scenes.

Edme-Louis Daubenton 1730 – 1785 was a French naturalist.
Daubenton was the cousin of another French naturalist, Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton. Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon engaged Edme-Louis Daubenton to supervise the coloured illustrations for the monumental Histoire Naturelle (1749–89). The Planches enluminée started to appear in 1765 and finally counted 1,008 plates, all engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet (1731–1800), and all painted by hand. The Parisian publisher Panckoucke published a version without text between 1765 and 1783. More than 80 artists took part in the realization of the original paintings. 973 plates relate to birds; others illustrate especially butterflies but also other insects, corals, etc. The illustrations were not very successful, but they allow a rather good determination of the species illustrated, some of them now extinct. As Buffon did not follow the system of biological nomenclature developed by Carl von Linné in 1783, Pieter Boddaert (1730–1796) published a table of the correspondence of the names used with their Linnean binomial names.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Blue, pink, red, green, yellow
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 12in x 9in (305mm x 230mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 8in (255mm x 205mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
The Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (Natural History, General and Particular, with a Description of the Kings Cabinet) is an encyclopaedic collection of 36 large (quarto) volumes written between 1749–1804 by the Comte de Buffon, and continued in eight more volumes after his death by his colleagues, led by Bernard Germain de Lacépède. The books cover what was known of the natural sciences at the time, including what would now be called material science, physics, chemistry and technology as well as the natural history of animals.
The Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi is the work that the Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) is remembered for. He worked on it for some 50 years, initially at Montbard in his office in the Tour Saint-Louis, then in his library at Petit Fontenet. 36 volumes came out between 1749 and 1789, followed by 8 more after his death, thanks to Bernard Germain de Lacépède. It includes all the knowledge available in his time on the natural sciences, a broad term that includes disciplines which today would be called material science, physics, chemistry and technology. Buffon notes the morphological similarities between men and apes, although he considered apes completely devoid of the ability to think, differentiating them sharply from human beings. Buffons attention to internal anatomy made him an early comparative anatomist. Lintérieur, dans les êtres vivants, est le fond du dessin de la nature, he wrote in his Quadrupèdes, the interior, in living things, is the foundation of natures design.
The Histoire Naturelle, which was meant to address the whole of natural history, actually covers only minerals, birds, and the quadrupeds among animals. It is accompanied by some discourses and a theory of the earth by way of introduction, and by supplements including an elegantly written account of the epochs of nature.
The Suppléments cover a wide range of topics; for example, in (Suppléments IV), there is a Discours sur le style (Discourse on Style) and an Essai darithmétique morale (essay on Moral Arithmetic).
Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton assisted Buffon on the quadrupeds; Philippe Guéneau de Montbeillard worked on the birds. They were joined, from 1767, by Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, the abbot Gabriel Bexon and Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt. The whole descriptive and anatomical part of lHistoire des Quadrupèdes was the work of Daubenton and Jean-Claude Mertrud.
Buffon attached much importance to the illustrations; Jacques de Sève illustrated the quadrupeds and François-Nicolas Martinet illustrated the birds. Nearly 2000 plates adorn the work, representing animals with care given both to aesthetics and anatomical accuracy, with dreamlike and mythological settings.
On minerals, Buffon collaborated with André Thouin. Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond and Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau provided sources for the mineral volumes.
L Histoire Naturelle met immense success, almost as great as Encyclopédie by Diderot, which came out in the same period. The first three volumes of LHistoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du cabinet du Roi were reprinted three times in six weeks.

The encyclopaedia appeared in 36 volumes :
3 volumes in 1749 : De la manière détudier lhistoire naturelle followed by Théorie de la Terre, Histoire Générale des animaux and Histoire Naturelle de lhomme
12 volumes on quadrupeds (1753 to 1767)
9 volumes on birds (1770 to 1783])
5 volumes on minerals (1783 to 1788), the last including Traité de laimant, the last work published by Buffon in his lifetime
7 volumes of supplements (1774 to 1789), including Époques de la nature (from 1778).
LHistoire Naturelle was initially printed at the Imprimerie royale in 36 volumes (1749–1789). In 1764 Buffon bought back the rights to his work. It was continued by Bernard Germain de Lacépède, who described the egg-laying quadrupeds, snakes, fishes and cetaceans in 8 volumes (1788–1804).

Buffon was assisted in the work by Jacques-François Artur (1708–1779), Gabriel Léopold Charles Amé Bexon (1748–1785), Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton (1716–1799), Edme-Louis Daubenton (1732–1786), Jacques de Sève (actif 1742–1788), Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond (1741–1819), Philippe Guéneau de Montbeillard (1720–1785), Louis-Bernard Guyton-Morveau (1737–1816), Bernard Germain de Lacépède (1756–1825), François-Nicolas Martinet (1731–1800), the anatomist Jean-Claude Mertrud (1728–1802), Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt (1751–1812), and André Thouin (1747–1823).
Each group is introduced with a general essay. This is followed by an article, sometimes of many pages, on each animal (or other item). The article on the wolf begins with the claim that it is one of the animals with a specially strong appetite for flesh; it asserts that the animal is naturally coarse and cowardly (grossier et poltron), but becoming crafty at need, and hardy by necessity, driven by hunger.[4] The language, as in this instance, is elegant and elaborate, even flowery and ornate.[5] Buffon was roundly criticised by his fellow academics for writing a purely popularizing work, empty and puffed up, with little real scientific value.
The species is named in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Swedish, and Polish. The zoological descriptions of the species by Gessner, Ray, Linnaeus, Klein and Buffon himself (Canis ex griseo flavescens. Lupus vulgaris. Buffon. Reg. animal. pag. 235) are cited.
The text is written as a continuous essay, without the sections on identification, distribution and behaviour that might have been expected from other natural histories. Parts concern human responses rather than the animal itself, as for example that the wolf likes human flesh, and the strongest wolves sometimes eat nothing else.[6] Measurements may be included; in the case of the wolf, 41 separate measurements are tabulated, in pre-revolutionary French feet and inches[a] starting with the Length of the whole body measured in a straight line from the end of the muzzle to the anus........3 feet. 7 inches. (1.2 m); the Length of the largest claws is given as 10 lines (2.2 cm).
The wolf is illustrated standing in farmland, and as a complete skeleton standing on a stone plinth in a landscape. The account of the species occupies 32 pages including illustrations.
The original edition of the Histoire Naturelle by Buffon comprised 36 volumes in quarto, divided into the following series: Histoire de la Terre et de lHomme, Quadrupèdes, Oiseaux, Minéraux, Suppléments. Buffon edited 35 volumes in his lifetime. Soon after his death, the fifth and final volume of lHistoire des minéraux appeared in 1788 at the Imprimerie des Bâtiments du Roi. The seventh and final volume of Suppléments by Buffon was published posthumously in 1789 through Lacépèdes hands. Lacépède continued the part of the Histoire Naturelle which dealt with animals. A few months before Buffons death, en 1788, Lacépède published, as a continuation, the first volume of his Histoire des Reptiles, on egg-laying quadrupeds. The next year, he wrote a second volume on snakes, published during the French Revolution. Between 1798 and 1803, he brought out the volume Histoire des Poissons. Lacépède made use of the notes and collections left by Philibert Commerson (1727–1773). He wrote Histoire des Cétacés which was printed in 1804. At that point, the Histoire Naturelle, by Buffon and Lacépède, thus contained 44 quarto volumes forming the definitive edition.
Another edition in quarto format was printed by the Imprimerie royale in 36 volumes (1774–1804). It consisted of 28 volumes par Buffon, and 8 volumes by Lacépède. The part containing anatomical articles by Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton was dropped. The supplements were merged into the relevant articles in the main volumes.

The Imprimerie royale also published two editions of the Histoire Naturelle in duodecimo format (1752–1805), occupying 90 or 71 volumes, depending on whether or not they included the part on anatomy. In this print format, the original work by Buffon occupied 73 volumes with the part on anatomy, or 54 volumes without the part on anatomy. The continuation by Lacépède took up 17 duodecimo volumes.
A de luxe edition of Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1771–1786) was produced by the Imprimerie royale in 10 folio and quarto volumes, with 1008 engraved and hand-coloured plates, executed under Buffons personal supervision by Edme-Louis Daubenton, cousin and brother-in-law of Buffons principal collaborator.

The original edition was arranged as follows:
Natural history, and description of the kings cabinet of curiosities
Volume I : Premier Discours - De la manière détudier et de traiter lhistoire naturelle, Second Discours - Histoire et théorie de la Terre, Preuves de la théorie de la Terre, 1749
Volume II : Histoire générale des Animaux, Histoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1749
Volume III : Description du cabinet du Roi, Histoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1749

Quadrupèdes (Quadrupeds) 
Volume IV (Quadrupèdes I) : Discours sur la nature des Animaux, Les Animaux domestiques, 1753
Volume V (Quadrupèdes II) : 1755
Volume VI (Quadrupèdes III) : Les Animaux sauvages, 1756
Volume VII (Quadrupèdes IV) : Les Animaux carnassiers, 1758
Volume VIII (Quadrupèdes V) : 1760
Volume IX (Quadrupèdes VI) : 1761
Volume X (Quadrupèdes VII) : 1763
Volume XI (Quadrupèdes VIII) : 1764
Volume XII (Quadrupèdes IX) : 1764
Volume XIII (Quadrupèdes X) : 1765
Volume XIV (Quadrupèdes XI) : Nomenclature des Singes, De la dégénération des Animaux, 1766
Volume XV (Quadrupèdes XII) : 1767

Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1770–1783) 
Volume XVI (Oiseaux I) : 1770
Volume XVII (Oiseaux II) : 1771
Volume XVIII (Oiseaux III) : 1774
Volume XIX (Oiseaux IV) : 1778
Volume XX (Oiseaux V) : 1778
Volume XXI (Oiseaux VI) : 1779
Volume XXII (Oiseaux VII) : 1780
Volume XXIII (Oiseaux VIII) : 1781
Volume XXIV (Oiseaux IX) : 1783

Histoire Naturelle des Minéraux (Minerals) (1783–1788) 
Volume XXV (Minéraux I) : 1783
Volume XXVI (Minéraux II) : 1783
Volume XXVII (Minéraux III) : 1785
Volume XXVIII (Minéraux IV) : 1786
Volume XXIX (Minéraux V) : Traité de lAimant et de ses usages, 1788

Suppléments à lHistoire Naturelle, générale et particulière (Supplements) (1774–1789) 
Volume XXX (Suppléments I) : Servant de suite à la Théorie de la Terre, et dintroduction à lHistoire des Minéraux, 1774
Volume XXXI (Suppléments II) : Servant de suite à la Théorie de la Terre, et de préliminaire à lHistoire des Végétaux - Parties Expérimentale & Hypothétique, 1775
Volume XXXII (Suppléments III) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1776
Volume XXXIII (Suppléments IV) : Servant de suite à lHistoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1777
Volume XXXIV (Suppléments V) : Des Époques de la nature, 1779
Volume XXXV (Suppléments VI) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1782
Volume XXXVI (Suppléments VII) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1789
Histoire Naturelle des Quadrupèdes ovipares et des Serpents (Egg-laying Quadrupeds and Snakes) (1788–1789)

The Gecko, 1788
Volume XXXVII (Reptiles I) : Histoire générale et particulière des Quadrupèdes ovipares, 1788
Volume XXXVIII (Reptiles II) : Histoire des Serpents, 1789

Histoire Naturelle des Poissons (Fish) (1798–1803) 
Volume XXXIX (Poissons I) : 1798
Volume XXXX (Poissons II) : 1800
Volume XXXXI (Poissons III) : 1802
Volume XXXXII (Poissons IV) : 1802
Volume XXXXIII (Poissons V) : 1803

Histoire Naturelle des Cétacés (Cetaceans) (1804) 
Volume XXXXIV (Cétacés) : 1804

• Title : Rale, de Cayenne
• Size: 12in x 9in (305mm x 230mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1775
• Ref #:  23507

Description:
This beautifully hand coloured original copper-plate engraved antique print was published in the 1775 Imperial quatro edtion of Comte de Buffons Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (Natural History, General and Particular, with a Description of the King\'s Cabinet)
These prints are rare produced for a limited release of Histoire Naturelle with both the engraving and hand colouring done under the supervision of the French naturalist. Edme-Louis Daubenton and engraved by the famous French engraver Francois Nicolas Martinet.

A deluxe edition of Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1771–1786) was produced by the Imprimerie royale in 10 folio and quarto volumes, with 1008 engraved by Francois Nicolas Martinet
and hand-coloured plates, executed under Buffons personal supervision by Edme-Louis Daubenton, cousin and brother-in-law of Buffons principal collaborator.

Francois Nicolas Martinet was a French engraver and draughtsman. In 1756, he was working for the court of France as Graveur du Cabinet du Roi, under the auspices of the Menus Plaisirs du Roi, making engravings after drawings by others of such subjects as the May Ball at Versailles during the Carnival of 1763. In the same period, Martinet produced illustrations for plays or comic operas by such contemporaries as Marmontel, Voltaire and Philidor. Some of these he engraved himself, while others were drawn by him but engraved by his sister Thérèse Martinet (born c. 1731). He is best known for his engravings of birds for Comte de Buffon\'s, Histoire Naturelle Des Oiseaux published in Paris from 1770-86. In 1768, a comprehensive group of natural history studies drafted by Martinet, and engraved by Robert Bénard were included in the natural history volume of Diderot and Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Martinet also drew and engraved portraits, landscapes and genre scenes.

Edme-Louis Daubenton 1730 – 1785 was a French naturalist.
Daubenton was the cousin of another French naturalist, Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton. Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon engaged Edme-Louis Daubenton to supervise the coloured illustrations for the monumental Histoire Naturelle (1749–89). The Planches enluminée started to appear in 1765 and finally counted 1,008 plates, all engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet (1731–1800), and all painted by hand. The Parisian publisher Panckoucke published a version without text between 1765 and 1783. More than 80 artists took part in the realization of the original paintings. 973 plates relate to birds; others illustrate especially butterflies but also other insects, corals, etc. The illustrations were not very successful, but they allow a rather good determination of the species illustrated, some of them now extinct. As Buffon did not follow the system of biological nomenclature developed by Carl von Linné in 1783, Pieter Boddaert (1730–1796) published a table of the correspondence of the names used with their Linnean binomial names.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Blue, pink, red, green, yellow
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 12in x 9in (305mm x 230mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 8in (255mm x 205mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
The Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (Natural History, General and Particular, with a Description of the Kings Cabinet) is an encyclopaedic collection of 36 large (quarto) volumes written between 1749–1804 by the Comte de Buffon, and continued in eight more volumes after his death by his colleagues, led by Bernard Germain de Lacépède. The books cover what was known of the natural sciences at the time, including what would now be called material science, physics, chemistry and technology as well as the natural history of animals.
The Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi is the work that the Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) is remembered for. He worked on it for some 50 years, initially at Montbard in his office in the Tour Saint-Louis, then in his library at Petit Fontenet. 36 volumes came out between 1749 and 1789, followed by 8 more after his death, thanks to Bernard Germain de Lacépède. It includes all the knowledge available in his time on the natural sciences, a broad term that includes disciplines which today would be called material science, physics, chemistry and technology. Buffon notes the morphological similarities between men and apes, although he considered apes completely devoid of the ability to think, differentiating them sharply from human beings. Buffons attention to internal anatomy made him an early comparative anatomist. Lintérieur, dans les êtres vivants, est le fond du dessin de la nature, he wrote in his Quadrupèdes, the interior, in living things, is the foundation of natures design.
The Histoire Naturelle, which was meant to address the whole of natural history, actually covers only minerals, birds, and the quadrupeds among animals. It is accompanied by some discourses and a theory of the earth by way of introduction, and by supplements including an elegantly written account of the epochs of nature.
The Suppléments cover a wide range of topics; for example, in (Suppléments IV), there is a Discours sur le style (Discourse on Style) and an Essai darithmétique morale (essay on Moral Arithmetic).
Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton assisted Buffon on the quadrupeds; Philippe Guéneau de Montbeillard worked on the birds. They were joined, from 1767, by Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, the abbot Gabriel Bexon and Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt. The whole descriptive and anatomical part of lHistoire des Quadrupèdes was the work of Daubenton and Jean-Claude Mertrud.
Buffon attached much importance to the illustrations; Jacques de Sève illustrated the quadrupeds and François-Nicolas Martinet illustrated the birds. Nearly 2000 plates adorn the work, representing animals with care given both to aesthetics and anatomical accuracy, with dreamlike and mythological settings.
On minerals, Buffon collaborated with André Thouin. Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond and Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau provided sources for the mineral volumes.
L Histoire Naturelle met immense success, almost as great as Encyclopédie by Diderot, which came out in the same period. The first three volumes of LHistoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du cabinet du Roi were reprinted three times in six weeks.

The encyclopaedia appeared in 36 volumes :
3 volumes in 1749 : De la manière détudier lhistoire naturelle followed by Théorie de la Terre, Histoire Générale des animaux and Histoire Naturelle de lhomme
12 volumes on quadrupeds (1753 to 1767)
9 volumes on birds (1770 to 1783])
5 volumes on minerals (1783 to 1788), the last including Traité de laimant, the last work published by Buffon in his lifetime
7 volumes of supplements (1774 to 1789), including Époques de la nature (from 1778).
LHistoire Naturelle was initially printed at the Imprimerie royale in 36 volumes (1749–1789). In 1764 Buffon bought back the rights to his work. It was continued by Bernard Germain de Lacépède, who described the egg-laying quadrupeds, snakes, fishes and cetaceans in 8 volumes (1788–1804).

Buffon was assisted in the work by Jacques-François Artur (1708–1779), Gabriel Léopold Charles Amé Bexon (1748–1785), Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton (1716–1799), Edme-Louis Daubenton (1732–1786), Jacques de Sève (actif 1742–1788), Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond (1741–1819), Philippe Guéneau de Montbeillard (1720–1785), Louis-Bernard Guyton-Morveau (1737–1816), Bernard Germain de Lacépède (1756–1825), François-Nicolas Martinet (1731–1800), the anatomist Jean-Claude Mertrud (1728–1802), Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt (1751–1812), and André Thouin (1747–1823).
Each group is introduced with a general essay. This is followed by an article, sometimes of many pages, on each animal (or other item). The article on the wolf begins with the claim that it is one of the animals with a specially strong appetite for flesh; it asserts that the animal is naturally coarse and cowardly (grossier et poltron), but becoming crafty at need, and hardy by necessity, driven by hunger.[4] The language, as in this instance, is elegant and elaborate, even flowery and ornate.[5] Buffon was roundly criticised by his fellow academics for writing a purely popularizing work, empty and puffed up, with little real scientific value.
The species is named in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Swedish, and Polish. The zoological descriptions of the species by Gessner, Ray, Linnaeus, Klein and Buffon himself (Canis ex griseo flavescens. Lupus vulgaris. Buffon. Reg. animal. pag. 235) are cited.
The text is written as a continuous essay, without the sections on identification, distribution and behaviour that might have been expected from other natural histories. Parts concern human responses rather than the animal itself, as for example that the wolf likes human flesh, and the strongest wolves sometimes eat nothing else.[6] Measurements may be included; in the case of the wolf, 41 separate measurements are tabulated, in pre-revolutionary French feet and inches[a] starting with the Length of the whole body measured in a straight line from the end of the muzzle to the anus........3 feet. 7 inches. (1.2 m); the Length of the largest claws is given as 10 lines (2.2 cm).
The wolf is illustrated standing in farmland, and as a complete skeleton standing on a stone plinth in a landscape. The account of the species occupies 32 pages including illustrations.
The original edition of the Histoire Naturelle by Buffon comprised 36 volumes in quarto, divided into the following series: Histoire de la Terre et de lHomme, Quadrupèdes, Oiseaux, Minéraux, Suppléments. Buffon edited 35 volumes in his lifetime. Soon after his death, the fifth and final volume of lHistoire des minéraux appeared in 1788 at the Imprimerie des Bâtiments du Roi. The seventh and final volume of Suppléments by Buffon was published posthumously in 1789 through Lacépèdes hands. Lacépède continued the part of the Histoire Naturelle which dealt with animals. A few months before Buffons death, en 1788, Lacépède published, as a continuation, the first volume of his Histoire des Reptiles, on egg-laying quadrupeds. The next year, he wrote a second volume on snakes, published during the French Revolution. Between 1798 and 1803, he brought out the volume Histoire des Poissons. Lacépède made use of the notes and collections left by Philibert Commerson (1727–1773). He wrote Histoire des Cétacés which was printed in 1804. At that point, the Histoire Naturelle, by Buffon and Lacépède, thus contained 44 quarto volumes forming the definitive edition.
Another edition in quarto format was printed by the Imprimerie royale in 36 volumes (1774–1804). It consisted of 28 volumes par Buffon, and 8 volumes by Lacépède. The part containing anatomical articles by Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton was dropped. The supplements were merged into the relevant articles in the main volumes.

The Imprimerie royale also published two editions of the Histoire Naturelle in duodecimo format (1752–1805), occupying 90 or 71 volumes, depending on whether or not they included the part on anatomy. In this print format, the original work by Buffon occupied 73 volumes with the part on anatomy, or 54 volumes without the part on anatomy. The continuation by Lacépède took up 17 duodecimo volumes.
A de luxe edition of Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1771–1786) was produced by the Imprimerie royale in 10 folio and quarto volumes, with 1008 engraved and hand-coloured plates, executed under Buffons personal supervision by Edme-Louis Daubenton, cousin and brother-in-law of Buffons principal collaborator.

The original edition was arranged as follows:
Natural history, and description of the kings cabinet of curiosities
Volume I : Premier Discours - De la manière détudier et de traiter lhistoire naturelle, Second Discours - Histoire et théorie de la Terre, Preuves de la théorie de la Terre, 1749
Volume II : Histoire générale des Animaux, Histoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1749
Volume III : Description du cabinet du Roi, Histoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1749

Quadrupèdes (Quadrupeds) 
Volume IV (Quadrupèdes I) : Discours sur la nature des Animaux, Les Animaux domestiques, 1753
Volume V (Quadrupèdes II) : 1755
Volume VI (Quadrupèdes III) : Les Animaux sauvages, 1756
Volume VII (Quadrupèdes IV) : Les Animaux carnassiers, 1758
Volume VIII (Quadrupèdes V) : 1760
Volume IX (Quadrupèdes VI) : 1761
Volume X (Quadrupèdes VII) : 1763
Volume XI (Quadrupèdes VIII) : 1764
Volume XII (Quadrupèdes IX) : 1764
Volume XIII (Quadrupèdes X) : 1765
Volume XIV (Quadrupèdes XI) : Nomenclature des Singes, De la dégénération des Animaux, 1766
Volume XV (Quadrupèdes XII) : 1767

Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1770–1783) 
Volume XVI (Oiseaux I) : 1770
Volume XVII (Oiseaux II) : 1771
Volume XVIII (Oiseaux III) : 1774
Volume XIX (Oiseaux IV) : 1778
Volume XX (Oiseaux V) : 1778
Volume XXI (Oiseaux VI) : 1779
Volume XXII (Oiseaux VII) : 1780
Volume XXIII (Oiseaux VIII) : 1781
Volume XXIV (Oiseaux IX) : 1783

Histoire Naturelle des Minéraux (Minerals) (1783–1788) 
Volume XXV (Minéraux I) : 1783
Volume XXVI (Minéraux II) : 1783
Volume XXVII (Minéraux III) : 1785
Volume XXVIII (Minéraux IV) : 1786
Volume XXIX (Minéraux V) : Traité de lAimant et de ses usages, 1788

Suppléments à lHistoire Naturelle, générale et particulière (Supplements) (1774–1789) 
Volume XXX (Suppléments I) : Servant de suite à la Théorie de la Terre, et dintroduction à lHistoire des Minéraux, 1774
Volume XXXI (Suppléments II) : Servant de suite à la Théorie de la Terre, et de préliminaire à lHistoire des Végétaux - Parties Expérimentale & Hypothétique, 1775
Volume XXXII (Suppléments III) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1776
Volume XXXIII (Suppléments IV) : Servant de suite à lHistoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1777
Volume XXXIV (Suppléments V) : Des Époques de la nature, 1779
Volume XXXV (Suppléments VI) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1782
Volume XXXVI (Suppléments VII) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1789
Histoire Naturelle des Quadrupèdes ovipares et des Serpents (Egg-laying Quadrupeds and Snakes) (1788–1789)

The Gecko, 1788
Volume XXXVII (Reptiles I) : Histoire générale et particulière des Quadrupèdes ovipares, 1788
Volume XXXVIII (Reptiles II) : Histoire des Serpents, 1789

Histoire Naturelle des Poissons (Fish) (1798–1803) 
Volume XXXIX (Poissons I) : 1798
Volume XXXX (Poissons II) : 1800
Volume XXXXI (Poissons III) : 1802
Volume XXXXII (Poissons IV) : 1802
Volume XXXXIII (Poissons V) : 1803

Histoire Naturelle des Cétacés (Cetaceans) (1804) 
Volume XXXXIV (Cétacés) : 1804

• Title : Le Guepier
• Size: 12in x 9in (305mm x 230mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1775
• Ref #:  23511

Description:
This beautifully hand coloured original copper-plate engraved antique print was published in the 1775 Imperial quatro edtion of Comte de Buffons Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (Natural History, General and Particular, with a Description of the King\'s Cabinet)
These prints are rare produced for a limited release of Histoire Naturelle with both the engraving and hand colouring done under the supervision of the French naturalist. Edme-Louis Daubenton and engraved by the famous French engraver Francois Nicolas Martinet.

A deluxe edition of Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1771–1786) was produced by the Imprimerie royale in 10 folio and quarto volumes, with 1008 engraved by Francois Nicolas Martinet
and hand-coloured plates, executed under Buffons personal supervision by Edme-Louis Daubenton, cousin and brother-in-law of Buffons principal collaborator.

Francois Nicolas Martinet was a French engraver and draughtsman. In 1756, he was working for the court of France as Graveur du Cabinet du Roi, under the auspices of the Menus Plaisirs du Roi, making engravings after drawings by others of such subjects as the May Ball at Versailles during the Carnival of 1763. In the same period, Martinet produced illustrations for plays or comic operas by such contemporaries as Marmontel, Voltaire and Philidor. Some of these he engraved himself, while others were drawn by him but engraved by his sister Thérèse Martinet (born c. 1731). He is best known for his engravings of birds for Comte de Buffon\'s, Histoire Naturelle Des Oiseaux published in Paris from 1770-86. In 1768, a comprehensive group of natural history studies drafted by Martinet, and engraved by Robert Bénard were included in the natural history volume of Diderot and Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Martinet also drew and engraved portraits, landscapes and genre scenes.

Edme-Louis Daubenton 1730 – 1785 was a French naturalist.
Daubenton was the cousin of another French naturalist, Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton. Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon engaged Edme-Louis Daubenton to supervise the coloured illustrations for the monumental Histoire Naturelle (1749–89). The Planches enluminée started to appear in 1765 and finally counted 1,008 plates, all engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet (1731–1800), and all painted by hand. The Parisian publisher Panckoucke published a version without text between 1765 and 1783. More than 80 artists took part in the realization of the original paintings. 973 plates relate to birds; others illustrate especially butterflies but also other insects, corals, etc. The illustrations were not very successful, but they allow a rather good determination of the species illustrated, some of them now extinct. As Buffon did not follow the system of biological nomenclature developed by Carl von Linné in 1783, Pieter Boddaert (1730–1796) published a table of the correspondence of the names used with their Linnean binomial names.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Blue, pink, red, green, yellow
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 12in x 9in (305mm x 230mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 8in (255mm x 205mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
The Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (Natural History, General and Particular, with a Description of the Kings Cabinet) is an encyclopaedic collection of 36 large (quarto) volumes written between 1749–1804 by the Comte de Buffon, and continued in eight more volumes after his death by his colleagues, led by Bernard Germain de Lacépède. The books cover what was known of the natural sciences at the time, including what would now be called material science, physics, chemistry and technology as well as the natural history of animals.
The Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi is the work that the Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) is remembered for. He worked on it for some 50 years, initially at Montbard in his office in the Tour Saint-Louis, then in his library at Petit Fontenet. 36 volumes came out between 1749 and 1789, followed by 8 more after his death, thanks to Bernard Germain de Lacépède. It includes all the knowledge available in his time on the natural sciences, a broad term that includes disciplines which today would be called material science, physics, chemistry and technology. Buffon notes the morphological similarities between men and apes, although he considered apes completely devoid of the ability to think, differentiating them sharply from human beings. Buffons attention to internal anatomy made him an early comparative anatomist. Lintérieur, dans les êtres vivants, est le fond du dessin de la nature, he wrote in his Quadrupèdes, the interior, in living things, is the foundation of natures design.
The Histoire Naturelle, which was meant to address the whole of natural history, actually covers only minerals, birds, and the quadrupeds among animals. It is accompanied by some discourses and a theory of the earth by way of introduction, and by supplements including an elegantly written account of the epochs of nature.
The Suppléments cover a wide range of topics; for example, in (Suppléments IV), there is a Discours sur le style (Discourse on Style) and an Essai darithmétique morale (essay on Moral Arithmetic).
Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton assisted Buffon on the quadrupeds; Philippe Guéneau de Montbeillard worked on the birds. They were joined, from 1767, by Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, the abbot Gabriel Bexon and Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt. The whole descriptive and anatomical part of lHistoire des Quadrupèdes was the work of Daubenton and Jean-Claude Mertrud.
Buffon attached much importance to the illustrations; Jacques de Sève illustrated the quadrupeds and François-Nicolas Martinet illustrated the birds. Nearly 2000 plates adorn the work, representing animals with care given both to aesthetics and anatomical accuracy, with dreamlike and mythological settings.
On minerals, Buffon collaborated with André Thouin. Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond and Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau provided sources for the mineral volumes.
L Histoire Naturelle met immense success, almost as great as Encyclopédie by Diderot, which came out in the same period. The first three volumes of LHistoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du cabinet du Roi were reprinted three times in six weeks.

The encyclopaedia appeared in 36 volumes :
3 volumes in 1749 : De la manière détudier lhistoire naturelle followed by Théorie de la Terre, Histoire Générale des animaux and Histoire Naturelle de lhomme
12 volumes on quadrupeds (1753 to 1767)
9 volumes on birds (1770 to 1783])
5 volumes on minerals (1783 to 1788), the last including Traité de laimant, the last work published by Buffon in his lifetime
7 volumes of supplements (1774 to 1789), including Époques de la nature (from 1778).
LHistoire Naturelle was initially printed at the Imprimerie royale in 36 volumes (1749–1789). In 1764 Buffon bought back the rights to his work. It was continued by Bernard Germain de Lacépède, who described the egg-laying quadrupeds, snakes, fishes and cetaceans in 8 volumes (1788–1804).

Buffon was assisted in the work by Jacques-François Artur (1708–1779), Gabriel Léopold Charles Amé Bexon (1748–1785), Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton (1716–1799), Edme-Louis Daubenton (1732–1786), Jacques de Sève (actif 1742–1788), Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond (1741–1819), Philippe Guéneau de Montbeillard (1720–1785), Louis-Bernard Guyton-Morveau (1737–1816), Bernard Germain de Lacépède (1756–1825), François-Nicolas Martinet (1731–1800), the anatomist Jean-Claude Mertrud (1728–1802), Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt (1751–1812), and André Thouin (1747–1823).
Each group is introduced with a general essay. This is followed by an article, sometimes of many pages, on each animal (or other item). The article on the wolf begins with the claim that it is one of the animals with a specially strong appetite for flesh; it asserts that the animal is naturally coarse and cowardly (grossier et poltron), but becoming crafty at need, and hardy by necessity, driven by hunger.[4] The language, as in this instance, is elegant and elaborate, even flowery and ornate.[5] Buffon was roundly criticised by his fellow academics for writing a purely popularizing work, empty and puffed up, with little real scientific value.
The species is named in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Swedish, and Polish. The zoological descriptions of the species by Gessner, Ray, Linnaeus, Klein and Buffon himself (Canis ex griseo flavescens. Lupus vulgaris. Buffon. Reg. animal. pag. 235) are cited.
The text is written as a continuous essay, without the sections on identification, distribution and behaviour that might have been expected from other natural histories. Parts concern human responses rather than the animal itself, as for example that the wolf likes human flesh, and the strongest wolves sometimes eat nothing else.[6] Measurements may be included; in the case of the wolf, 41 separate measurements are tabulated, in pre-revolutionary French feet and inches[a] starting with the Length of the whole body measured in a straight line from the end of the muzzle to the anus........3 feet. 7 inches. (1.2 m); the Length of the largest claws is given as 10 lines (2.2 cm).
The wolf is illustrated standing in farmland, and as a complete skeleton standing on a stone plinth in a landscape. The account of the species occupies 32 pages including illustrations.
The original edition of the Histoire Naturelle by Buffon comprised 36 volumes in quarto, divided into the following series: Histoire de la Terre et de lHomme, Quadrupèdes, Oiseaux, Minéraux, Suppléments. Buffon edited 35 volumes in his lifetime. Soon after his death, the fifth and final volume of lHistoire des minéraux appeared in 1788 at the Imprimerie des Bâtiments du Roi. The seventh and final volume of Suppléments by Buffon was published posthumously in 1789 through Lacépèdes hands. Lacépède continued the part of the Histoire Naturelle which dealt with animals. A few months before Buffons death, en 1788, Lacépède published, as a continuation, the first volume of his Histoire des Reptiles, on egg-laying quadrupeds. The next year, he wrote a second volume on snakes, published during the French Revolution. Between 1798 and 1803, he brought out the volume Histoire des Poissons. Lacépède made use of the notes and collections left by Philibert Commerson (1727–1773). He wrote Histoire des Cétacés which was printed in 1804. At that point, the Histoire Naturelle, by Buffon and Lacépède, thus contained 44 quarto volumes forming the definitive edition.
Another edition in quarto format was printed by the Imprimerie royale in 36 volumes (1774–1804). It consisted of 28 volumes par Buffon, and 8 volumes by Lacépède. The part containing anatomical articles by Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton was dropped. The supplements were merged into the relevant articles in the main volumes.

The Imprimerie royale also published two editions of the Histoire Naturelle in duodecimo format (1752–1805), occupying 90 or 71 volumes, depending on whether or not they included the part on anatomy. In this print format, the original work by Buffon occupied 73 volumes with the part on anatomy, or 54 volumes without the part on anatomy. The continuation by Lacépède took up 17 duodecimo volumes.
A de luxe edition of Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1771–1786) was produced by the Imprimerie royale in 10 folio and quarto volumes, with 1008 engraved and hand-coloured plates, executed under Buffons personal supervision by Edme-Louis Daubenton, cousin and brother-in-law of Buffons principal collaborator.

The original edition was arranged as follows:
Natural history, and description of the kings cabinet of curiosities
Volume I : Premier Discours - De la manière détudier et de traiter lhistoire naturelle, Second Discours - Histoire et théorie de la Terre, Preuves de la théorie de la Terre, 1749
Volume II : Histoire générale des Animaux, Histoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1749
Volume III : Description du cabinet du Roi, Histoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1749

Quadrupèdes (Quadrupeds) 
Volume IV (Quadrupèdes I) : Discours sur la nature des Animaux, Les Animaux domestiques, 1753
Volume V (Quadrupèdes II) : 1755
Volume VI (Quadrupèdes III) : Les Animaux sauvages, 1756
Volume VII (Quadrupèdes IV) : Les Animaux carnassiers, 1758
Volume VIII (Quadrupèdes V) : 1760
Volume IX (Quadrupèdes VI) : 1761
Volume X (Quadrupèdes VII) : 1763
Volume XI (Quadrupèdes VIII) : 1764
Volume XII (Quadrupèdes IX) : 1764
Volume XIII (Quadrupèdes X) : 1765
Volume XIV (Quadrupèdes XI) : Nomenclature des Singes, De la dégénération des Animaux, 1766
Volume XV (Quadrupèdes XII) : 1767

Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1770–1783) 
Volume XVI (Oiseaux I) : 1770
Volume XVII (Oiseaux II) : 1771
Volume XVIII (Oiseaux III) : 1774
Volume XIX (Oiseaux IV) : 1778
Volume XX (Oiseaux V) : 1778
Volume XXI (Oiseaux VI) : 1779
Volume XXII (Oiseaux VII) : 1780
Volume XXIII (Oiseaux VIII) : 1781
Volume XXIV (Oiseaux IX) : 1783

Histoire Naturelle des Minéraux (Minerals) (1783–1788) 
Volume XXV (Minéraux I) : 1783
Volume XXVI (Minéraux II) : 1783
Volume XXVII (Minéraux III) : 1785
Volume XXVIII (Minéraux IV) : 1786
Volume XXIX (Minéraux V) : Traité de lAimant et de ses usages, 1788

Suppléments à lHistoire Naturelle, générale et particulière (Supplements) (1774–1789) 
Volume XXX (Suppléments I) : Servant de suite à la Théorie de la Terre, et dintroduction à lHistoire des Minéraux, 1774
Volume XXXI (Suppléments II) : Servant de suite à la Théorie de la Terre, et de préliminaire à lHistoire des Végétaux - Parties Expérimentale & Hypothétique, 1775
Volume XXXII (Suppléments III) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1776
Volume XXXIII (Suppléments IV) : Servant de suite à lHistoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1777
Volume XXXIV (Suppléments V) : Des Époques de la nature, 1779
Volume XXXV (Suppléments VI) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1782
Volume XXXVI (Suppléments VII) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1789
Histoire Naturelle des Quadrupèdes ovipares et des Serpents (Egg-laying Quadrupeds and Snakes) (1788–1789)

The Gecko, 1788
Volume XXXVII (Reptiles I) : Histoire générale et particulière des Quadrupèdes ovipares, 1788
Volume XXXVIII (Reptiles II) : Histoire des Serpents, 1789

Histoire Naturelle des Poissons (Fish) (1798–1803) 
Volume XXXIX (Poissons I) : 1798
Volume XXXX (Poissons II) : 1800
Volume XXXXI (Poissons III) : 1802
Volume XXXXII (Poissons IV) : 1802
Volume XXXXIII (Poissons V) : 1803

Histoire Naturelle des Cétacés (Cetaceans) (1804) 
Volume XXXXIV (Cétacés) : 1804

• Title : Pic varie Femelle, de la Jamaique
• Size: 12in x 9in (305mm x 230mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1775
• Ref #:  23506

Description:
This beautifully hand coloured original copper-plate engraved antique print was published in the 1775 Imperial quatro edtion of Comte de Buffons Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (Natural History, General and Particular, with a Description of the King\'s Cabinet)
These prints are rare produced for a limited release of Histoire Naturelle with both the engraving and hand colouring done under the supervision of the French naturalist. Edme-Louis Daubenton and engraved by the famous French engraver Francois Nicolas Martinet.

A deluxe edition of Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1771–1786) was produced by the Imprimerie royale in 10 folio and quarto volumes, with 1008 engraved by Francois Nicolas Martinet
and hand-coloured plates, executed under Buffons personal supervision by Edme-Louis Daubenton, cousin and brother-in-law of Buffons principal collaborator.

Francois Nicolas Martinet was a French engraver and draughtsman. In 1756, he was working for the court of France as Graveur du Cabinet du Roi, under the auspices of the Menus Plaisirs du Roi, making engravings after drawings by others of such subjects as the May Ball at Versailles during the Carnival of 1763. In the same period, Martinet produced illustrations for plays or comic operas by such contemporaries as Marmontel, Voltaire and Philidor. Some of these he engraved himself, while others were drawn by him but engraved by his sister Thérèse Martinet (born c. 1731). He is best known for his engravings of birds for Comte de Buffon\'s, Histoire Naturelle Des Oiseaux published in Paris from 1770-86. In 1768, a comprehensive group of natural history studies drafted by Martinet, and engraved by Robert Bénard were included in the natural history volume of Diderot and Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Martinet also drew and engraved portraits, landscapes and genre scenes.

Edme-Louis Daubenton 1730 – 1785 was a French naturalist.
Daubenton was the cousin of another French naturalist, Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton. Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon engaged Edme-Louis Daubenton to supervise the coloured illustrations for the monumental Histoire Naturelle (1749–89). The Planches enluminée started to appear in 1765 and finally counted 1,008 plates, all engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet (1731–1800), and all painted by hand. The Parisian publisher Panckoucke published a version without text between 1765 and 1783. More than 80 artists took part in the realization of the original paintings. 973 plates relate to birds; others illustrate especially butterflies but also other insects, corals, etc. The illustrations were not very successful, but they allow a rather good determination of the species illustrated, some of them now extinct. As Buffon did not follow the system of biological nomenclature developed by Carl von Linné in 1783, Pieter Boddaert (1730–1796) published a table of the correspondence of the names used with their Linnean binomial names.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Blue, pink, red, green, yellow
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 12in x 9in (305mm x 230mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 8in (255mm x 205mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
The Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (Natural History, General and Particular, with a Description of the Kings Cabinet) is an encyclopaedic collection of 36 large (quarto) volumes written between 1749–1804 by the Comte de Buffon, and continued in eight more volumes after his death by his colleagues, led by Bernard Germain de Lacépède. The books cover what was known of the natural sciences at the time, including what would now be called material science, physics, chemistry and technology as well as the natural history of animals.
The Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi is the work that the Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) is remembered for. He worked on it for some 50 years, initially at Montbard in his office in the Tour Saint-Louis, then in his library at Petit Fontenet. 36 volumes came out between 1749 and 1789, followed by 8 more after his death, thanks to Bernard Germain de Lacépède. It includes all the knowledge available in his time on the natural sciences, a broad term that includes disciplines which today would be called material science, physics, chemistry and technology. Buffon notes the morphological similarities between men and apes, although he considered apes completely devoid of the ability to think, differentiating them sharply from human beings. Buffons attention to internal anatomy made him an early comparative anatomist. Lintérieur, dans les êtres vivants, est le fond du dessin de la nature, he wrote in his Quadrupèdes, the interior, in living things, is the foundation of natures design.
The Histoire Naturelle, which was meant to address the whole of natural history, actually covers only minerals, birds, and the quadrupeds among animals. It is accompanied by some discourses and a theory of the earth by way of introduction, and by supplements including an elegantly written account of the epochs of nature.
The Suppléments cover a wide range of topics; for example, in (Suppléments IV), there is a Discours sur le style (Discourse on Style) and an Essai darithmétique morale (essay on Moral Arithmetic).
Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton assisted Buffon on the quadrupeds; Philippe Guéneau de Montbeillard worked on the birds. They were joined, from 1767, by Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, the abbot Gabriel Bexon and Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt. The whole descriptive and anatomical part of lHistoire des Quadrupèdes was the work of Daubenton and Jean-Claude Mertrud.
Buffon attached much importance to the illustrations; Jacques de Sève illustrated the quadrupeds and François-Nicolas Martinet illustrated the birds. Nearly 2000 plates adorn the work, representing animals with care given both to aesthetics and anatomical accuracy, with dreamlike and mythological settings.
On minerals, Buffon collaborated with André Thouin. Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond and Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau provided sources for the mineral volumes.
L Histoire Naturelle met immense success, almost as great as Encyclopédie by Diderot, which came out in the same period. The first three volumes of LHistoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du cabinet du Roi were reprinted three times in six weeks.

The encyclopaedia appeared in 36 volumes :
3 volumes in 1749 : De la manière détudier lhistoire naturelle followed by Théorie de la Terre, Histoire Générale des animaux and Histoire Naturelle de lhomme
12 volumes on quadrupeds (1753 to 1767)
9 volumes on birds (1770 to 1783])
5 volumes on minerals (1783 to 1788), the last including Traité de laimant, the last work published by Buffon in his lifetime
7 volumes of supplements (1774 to 1789), including Époques de la nature (from 1778).
LHistoire Naturelle was initially printed at the Imprimerie royale in 36 volumes (1749–1789). In 1764 Buffon bought back the rights to his work. It was continued by Bernard Germain de Lacépède, who described the egg-laying quadrupeds, snakes, fishes and cetaceans in 8 volumes (1788–1804).

Buffon was assisted in the work by Jacques-François Artur (1708–1779), Gabriel Léopold Charles Amé Bexon (1748–1785), Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton (1716–1799), Edme-Louis Daubenton (1732–1786), Jacques de Sève (actif 1742–1788), Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond (1741–1819), Philippe Guéneau de Montbeillard (1720–1785), Louis-Bernard Guyton-Morveau (1737–1816), Bernard Germain de Lacépède (1756–1825), François-Nicolas Martinet (1731–1800), the anatomist Jean-Claude Mertrud (1728–1802), Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt (1751–1812), and André Thouin (1747–1823).
Each group is introduced with a general essay. This is followed by an article, sometimes of many pages, on each animal (or other item). The article on the wolf begins with the claim that it is one of the animals with a specially strong appetite for flesh; it asserts that the animal is naturally coarse and cowardly (grossier et poltron), but becoming crafty at need, and hardy by necessity, driven by hunger.[4] The language, as in this instance, is elegant and elaborate, even flowery and ornate.[5] Buffon was roundly criticised by his fellow academics for writing a purely popularizing work, empty and puffed up, with little real scientific value.
The species is named in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Swedish, and Polish. The zoological descriptions of the species by Gessner, Ray, Linnaeus, Klein and Buffon himself (Canis ex griseo flavescens. Lupus vulgaris. Buffon. Reg. animal. pag. 235) are cited.
The text is written as a continuous essay, without the sections on identification, distribution and behaviour that might have been expected from other natural histories. Parts concern human responses rather than the animal itself, as for example that the wolf likes human flesh, and the strongest wolves sometimes eat nothing else.[6] Measurements may be included; in the case of the wolf, 41 separate measurements are tabulated, in pre-revolutionary French feet and inches[a] starting with the Length of the whole body measured in a straight line from the end of the muzzle to the anus........3 feet. 7 inches. (1.2 m); the Length of the largest claws is given as 10 lines (2.2 cm).
The wolf is illustrated standing in farmland, and as a complete skeleton standing on a stone plinth in a landscape. The account of the species occupies 32 pages including illustrations.
The original edition of the Histoire Naturelle by Buffon comprised 36 volumes in quarto, divided into the following series: Histoire de la Terre et de lHomme, Quadrupèdes, Oiseaux, Minéraux, Suppléments. Buffon edited 35 volumes in his lifetime. Soon after his death, the fifth and final volume of lHistoire des minéraux appeared in 1788 at the Imprimerie des Bâtiments du Roi. The seventh and final volume of Suppléments by Buffon was published posthumously in 1789 through Lacépèdes hands. Lacépède continued the part of the Histoire Naturelle which dealt with animals. A few months before Buffons death, en 1788, Lacépède published, as a continuation, the first volume of his Histoire des Reptiles, on egg-laying quadrupeds. The next year, he wrote a second volume on snakes, published during the French Revolution. Between 1798 and 1803, he brought out the volume Histoire des Poissons. Lacépède made use of the notes and collections left by Philibert Commerson (1727–1773). He wrote Histoire des Cétacés which was printed in 1804. At that point, the Histoire Naturelle, by Buffon and Lacépède, thus contained 44 quarto volumes forming the definitive edition.
Another edition in quarto format was printed by the Imprimerie royale in 36 volumes (1774–1804). It consisted of 28 volumes par Buffon, and 8 volumes by Lacépède. The part containing anatomical articles by Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton was dropped. The supplements were merged into the relevant articles in the main volumes.

The Imprimerie royale also published two editions of the Histoire Naturelle in duodecimo format (1752–1805), occupying 90 or 71 volumes, depending on whether or not they included the part on anatomy. In this print format, the original work by Buffon occupied 73 volumes with the part on anatomy, or 54 volumes without the part on anatomy. The continuation by Lacépède took up 17 duodecimo volumes.
A de luxe edition of Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1771–1786) was produced by the Imprimerie royale in 10 folio and quarto volumes, with 1008 engraved and hand-coloured plates, executed under Buffons personal supervision by Edme-Louis Daubenton, cousin and brother-in-law of Buffons principal collaborator.

The original edition was arranged as follows:
Natural history, and description of the kings cabinet of curiosities
Volume I : Premier Discours - De la manière détudier et de traiter lhistoire naturelle, Second Discours - Histoire et théorie de la Terre, Preuves de la théorie de la Terre, 1749
Volume II : Histoire générale des Animaux, Histoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1749
Volume III : Description du cabinet du Roi, Histoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1749

Quadrupèdes (Quadrupeds) 
Volume IV (Quadrupèdes I) : Discours sur la nature des Animaux, Les Animaux domestiques, 1753
Volume V (Quadrupèdes II) : 1755
Volume VI (Quadrupèdes III) : Les Animaux sauvages, 1756
Volume VII (Quadrupèdes IV) : Les Animaux carnassiers, 1758
Volume VIII (Quadrupèdes V) : 1760
Volume IX (Quadrupèdes VI) : 1761
Volume X (Quadrupèdes VII) : 1763
Volume XI (Quadrupèdes VIII) : 1764
Volume XII (Quadrupèdes IX) : 1764
Volume XIII (Quadrupèdes X) : 1765
Volume XIV (Quadrupèdes XI) : Nomenclature des Singes, De la dégénération des Animaux, 1766
Volume XV (Quadrupèdes XII) : 1767

Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1770–1783) 
Volume XVI (Oiseaux I) : 1770
Volume XVII (Oiseaux II) : 1771
Volume XVIII (Oiseaux III) : 1774
Volume XIX (Oiseaux IV) : 1778
Volume XX (Oiseaux V) : 1778
Volume XXI (Oiseaux VI) : 1779
Volume XXII (Oiseaux VII) : 1780
Volume XXIII (Oiseaux VIII) : 1781
Volume XXIV (Oiseaux IX) : 1783

Histoire Naturelle des Minéraux (Minerals) (1783–1788) 
Volume XXV (Minéraux I) : 1783
Volume XXVI (Minéraux II) : 1783
Volume XXVII (Minéraux III) : 1785
Volume XXVIII (Minéraux IV) : 1786
Volume XXIX (Minéraux V) : Traité de lAimant et de ses usages, 1788

Suppléments à lHistoire Naturelle, générale et particulière (Supplements) (1774–1789) 
Volume XXX (Suppléments I) : Servant de suite à la Théorie de la Terre, et dintroduction à lHistoire des Minéraux, 1774
Volume XXXI (Suppléments II) : Servant de suite à la Théorie de la Terre, et de préliminaire à lHistoire des Végétaux - Parties Expérimentale & Hypothétique, 1775
Volume XXXII (Suppléments III) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1776
Volume XXXIII (Suppléments IV) : Servant de suite à lHistoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1777
Volume XXXIV (Suppléments V) : Des Époques de la nature, 1779
Volume XXXV (Suppléments VI) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1782
Volume XXXVI (Suppléments VII) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1789
Histoire Naturelle des Quadrupèdes ovipares et des Serpents (Egg-laying Quadrupeds and Snakes) (1788–1789)

The Gecko, 1788
Volume XXXVII (Reptiles I) : Histoire générale et particulière des Quadrupèdes ovipares, 1788
Volume XXXVIII (Reptiles II) : Histoire des Serpents, 1789

Histoire Naturelle des Poissons (Fish) (1798–1803) 
Volume XXXIX (Poissons I) : 1798
Volume XXXX (Poissons II) : 1800
Volume XXXXI (Poissons III) : 1802
Volume XXXXII (Poissons IV) : 1802
Volume XXXXIII (Poissons V) : 1803

Histoire Naturelle des Cétacés (Cetaceans) (1804) 
Volume XXXXIV (Cétacés) : 1804

• Title : Courly a Col blanc, de Cayenne
• Size: 12in x 9in (305mm x 230mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1775
• Ref #:  23508-1

Description:
This beautifully hand coloured original copper-plate engraved antique print was published in the 1775 Imperial quatro edtion of Comte de Buffons Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (Natural History, General and Particular, with a Description of the King\'s Cabinet)
These prints are rare produced for a limited release of Histoire Naturelle with both the engraving and hand colouring done under the supervision of the French naturalist. Edme-Louis Daubenton and engraved by the famous French engraver Francois Nicolas Martinet.

A deluxe edition of Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1771–1786) was produced by the Imprimerie royale in 10 folio and quarto volumes, with 1008 engraved by Francois Nicolas Martinet
and hand-coloured plates, executed under Buffons personal supervision by Edme-Louis Daubenton, cousin and brother-in-law of Buffons principal collaborator.

Francois Nicolas Martinet was a French engraver and draughtsman. In 1756, he was working for the court of France as Graveur du Cabinet du Roi, under the auspices of the Menus Plaisirs du Roi, making engravings after drawings by others of such subjects as the May Ball at Versailles during the Carnival of 1763. In the same period, Martinet produced illustrations for plays or comic operas by such contemporaries as Marmontel, Voltaire and Philidor. Some of these he engraved himself, while others were drawn by him but engraved by his sister Thérèse Martinet (born c. 1731). He is best known for his engravings of birds for Comte de Buffon\'s, Histoire Naturelle Des Oiseaux published in Paris from 1770-86. In 1768, a comprehensive group of natural history studies drafted by Martinet, and engraved by Robert Bénard were included in the natural history volume of Diderot and Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Martinet also drew and engraved portraits, landscapes and genre scenes.

Edme-Louis Daubenton 1730 – 1785 was a French naturalist.
Daubenton was the cousin of another French naturalist, Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton. Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon engaged Edme-Louis Daubenton to supervise the coloured illustrations for the monumental Histoire Naturelle (1749–89). The Planches enluminée started to appear in 1765 and finally counted 1,008 plates, all engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet (1731–1800), and all painted by hand. The Parisian publisher Panckoucke published a version without text between 1765 and 1783. More than 80 artists took part in the realization of the original paintings. 973 plates relate to birds; others illustrate especially butterflies but also other insects, corals, etc. The illustrations were not very successful, but they allow a rather good determination of the species illustrated, some of them now extinct. As Buffon did not follow the system of biological nomenclature developed by Carl von Linné in 1783, Pieter Boddaert (1730–1796) published a table of the correspondence of the names used with their Linnean binomial names.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Blue, pink, red, green, yellow
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 12in x 9in (305mm x 230mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 8in (255mm x 205mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
The Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (Natural History, General and Particular, with a Description of the Kings Cabinet) is an encyclopaedic collection of 36 large (quarto) volumes written between 1749–1804 by the Comte de Buffon, and continued in eight more volumes after his death by his colleagues, led by Bernard Germain de Lacépède. The books cover what was known of the natural sciences at the time, including what would now be called material science, physics, chemistry and technology as well as the natural history of animals.
The Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi is the work that the Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) is remembered for. He worked on it for some 50 years, initially at Montbard in his office in the Tour Saint-Louis, then in his library at Petit Fontenet. 36 volumes came out between 1749 and 1789, followed by 8 more after his death, thanks to Bernard Germain de Lacépède. It includes all the knowledge available in his time on the natural sciences, a broad term that includes disciplines which today would be called material science, physics, chemistry and technology. Buffon notes the morphological similarities between men and apes, although he considered apes completely devoid of the ability to think, differentiating them sharply from human beings. Buffons attention to internal anatomy made him an early comparative anatomist. Lintérieur, dans les êtres vivants, est le fond du dessin de la nature, he wrote in his Quadrupèdes, the interior, in living things, is the foundation of natures design.
The Histoire Naturelle, which was meant to address the whole of natural history, actually covers only minerals, birds, and the quadrupeds among animals. It is accompanied by some discourses and a theory of the earth by way of introduction, and by supplements including an elegantly written account of the epochs of nature.
The Suppléments cover a wide range of topics; for example, in (Suppléments IV), there is a Discours sur le style (Discourse on Style) and an Essai darithmétique morale (essay on Moral Arithmetic).
Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton assisted Buffon on the quadrupeds; Philippe Guéneau de Montbeillard worked on the birds. They were joined, from 1767, by Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, the abbot Gabriel Bexon and Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt. The whole descriptive and anatomical part of lHistoire des Quadrupèdes was the work of Daubenton and Jean-Claude Mertrud.
Buffon attached much importance to the illustrations; Jacques de Sève illustrated the quadrupeds and François-Nicolas Martinet illustrated the birds. Nearly 2000 plates adorn the work, representing animals with care given both to aesthetics and anatomical accuracy, with dreamlike and mythological settings.
On minerals, Buffon collaborated with André Thouin. Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond and Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau provided sources for the mineral volumes.
L Histoire Naturelle met immense success, almost as great as Encyclopédie by Diderot, which came out in the same period. The first three volumes of LHistoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du cabinet du Roi were reprinted three times in six weeks.

The encyclopaedia appeared in 36 volumes :
3 volumes in 1749 : De la manière détudier lhistoire naturelle followed by Théorie de la Terre, Histoire Générale des animaux and Histoire Naturelle de lhomme
12 volumes on quadrupeds (1753 to 1767)
9 volumes on birds (1770 to 1783])
5 volumes on minerals (1783 to 1788), the last including Traité de laimant, the last work published by Buffon in his lifetime
7 volumes of supplements (1774 to 1789), including Époques de la nature (from 1778).
LHistoire Naturelle was initially printed at the Imprimerie royale in 36 volumes (1749–1789). In 1764 Buffon bought back the rights to his work. It was continued by Bernard Germain de Lacépède, who described the egg-laying quadrupeds, snakes, fishes and cetaceans in 8 volumes (1788–1804).

Buffon was assisted in the work by Jacques-François Artur (1708–1779), Gabriel Léopold Charles Amé Bexon (1748–1785), Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton (1716–1799), Edme-Louis Daubenton (1732–1786), Jacques de Sève (actif 1742–1788), Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond (1741–1819), Philippe Guéneau de Montbeillard (1720–1785), Louis-Bernard Guyton-Morveau (1737–1816), Bernard Germain de Lacépède (1756–1825), François-Nicolas Martinet (1731–1800), the anatomist Jean-Claude Mertrud (1728–1802), Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt (1751–1812), and André Thouin (1747–1823).
Each group is introduced with a general essay. This is followed by an article, sometimes of many pages, on each animal (or other item). The article on the wolf begins with the claim that it is one of the animals with a specially strong appetite for flesh; it asserts that the animal is naturally coarse and cowardly (grossier et poltron), but becoming crafty at need, and hardy by necessity, driven by hunger.[4] The language, as in this instance, is elegant and elaborate, even flowery and ornate.[5] Buffon was roundly criticised by his fellow academics for writing a purely popularizing work, empty and puffed up, with little real scientific value.
The species is named in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Swedish, and Polish. The zoological descriptions of the species by Gessner, Ray, Linnaeus, Klein and Buffon himself (Canis ex griseo flavescens. Lupus vulgaris. Buffon. Reg. animal. pag. 235) are cited.
The text is written as a continuous essay, without the sections on identification, distribution and behaviour that might have been expected from other natural histories. Parts concern human responses rather than the animal itself, as for example that the wolf likes human flesh, and the strongest wolves sometimes eat nothing else.[6] Measurements may be included; in the case of the wolf, 41 separate measurements are tabulated, in pre-revolutionary French feet and inches[a] starting with the Length of the whole body measured in a straight line from the end of the muzzle to the anus........3 feet. 7 inches. (1.2 m); the Length of the largest claws is given as 10 lines (2.2 cm).
The wolf is illustrated standing in farmland, and as a complete skeleton standing on a stone plinth in a landscape. The account of the species occupies 32 pages including illustrations.
The original edition of the Histoire Naturelle by Buffon comprised 36 volumes in quarto, divided into the following series: Histoire de la Terre et de lHomme, Quadrupèdes, Oiseaux, Minéraux, Suppléments. Buffon edited 35 volumes in his lifetime. Soon after his death, the fifth and final volume of lHistoire des minéraux appeared in 1788 at the Imprimerie des Bâtiments du Roi. The seventh and final volume of Suppléments by Buffon was published posthumously in 1789 through Lacépèdes hands. Lacépède continued the part of the Histoire Naturelle which dealt with animals. A few months before Buffons death, en 1788, Lacépède published, as a continuation, the first volume of his Histoire des Reptiles, on egg-laying quadrupeds. The next year, he wrote a second volume on snakes, published during the French Revolution. Between 1798 and 1803, he brought out the volume Histoire des Poissons. Lacépède made use of the notes and collections left by Philibert Commerson (1727–1773). He wrote Histoire des Cétacés which was printed in 1804. At that point, the Histoire Naturelle, by Buffon and Lacépède, thus contained 44 quarto volumes forming the definitive edition.
Another edition in quarto format was printed by the Imprimerie royale in 36 volumes (1774–1804). It consisted of 28 volumes par Buffon, and 8 volumes by Lacépède. The part containing anatomical articles by Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton was dropped. The supplements were merged into the relevant articles in the main volumes.

The Imprimerie royale also published two editions of the Histoire Naturelle in duodecimo format (1752–1805), occupying 90 or 71 volumes, depending on whether or not they included the part on anatomy. In this print format, the original work by Buffon occupied 73 volumes with the part on anatomy, or 54 volumes without the part on anatomy. The continuation by Lacépède took up 17 duodecimo volumes.
A de luxe edition of Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1771–1786) was produced by the Imprimerie royale in 10 folio and quarto volumes, with 1008 engraved and hand-coloured plates, executed under Buffons personal supervision by Edme-Louis Daubenton, cousin and brother-in-law of Buffons principal collaborator.

The original edition was arranged as follows:
Natural history, and description of the kings cabinet of curiosities
Volume I : Premier Discours - De la manière détudier et de traiter lhistoire naturelle, Second Discours - Histoire et théorie de la Terre, Preuves de la théorie de la Terre, 1749
Volume II : Histoire générale des Animaux, Histoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1749
Volume III : Description du cabinet du Roi, Histoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1749

Quadrupèdes (Quadrupeds) 
Volume IV (Quadrupèdes I) : Discours sur la nature des Animaux, Les Animaux domestiques, 1753
Volume V (Quadrupèdes II) : 1755
Volume VI (Quadrupèdes III) : Les Animaux sauvages, 1756
Volume VII (Quadrupèdes IV) : Les Animaux carnassiers, 1758
Volume VIII (Quadrupèdes V) : 1760
Volume IX (Quadrupèdes VI) : 1761
Volume X (Quadrupèdes VII) : 1763
Volume XI (Quadrupèdes VIII) : 1764
Volume XII (Quadrupèdes IX) : 1764
Volume XIII (Quadrupèdes X) : 1765
Volume XIV (Quadrupèdes XI) : Nomenclature des Singes, De la dégénération des Animaux, 1766
Volume XV (Quadrupèdes XII) : 1767

Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Birds) (1770–1783) 
Volume XVI (Oiseaux I) : 1770
Volume XVII (Oiseaux II) : 1771
Volume XVIII (Oiseaux III) : 1774
Volume XIX (Oiseaux IV) : 1778
Volume XX (Oiseaux V) : 1778
Volume XXI (Oiseaux VI) : 1779
Volume XXII (Oiseaux VII) : 1780
Volume XXIII (Oiseaux VIII) : 1781
Volume XXIV (Oiseaux IX) : 1783

Histoire Naturelle des Minéraux (Minerals) (1783–1788) 
Volume XXV (Minéraux I) : 1783
Volume XXVI (Minéraux II) : 1783
Volume XXVII (Minéraux III) : 1785
Volume XXVIII (Minéraux IV) : 1786
Volume XXIX (Minéraux V) : Traité de lAimant et de ses usages, 1788

Suppléments à lHistoire Naturelle, générale et particulière (Supplements) (1774–1789) 
Volume XXX (Suppléments I) : Servant de suite à la Théorie de la Terre, et dintroduction à lHistoire des Minéraux, 1774
Volume XXXI (Suppléments II) : Servant de suite à la Théorie de la Terre, et de préliminaire à lHistoire des Végétaux - Parties Expérimentale & Hypothétique, 1775
Volume XXXII (Suppléments III) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1776
Volume XXXIII (Suppléments IV) : Servant de suite à lHistoire Naturelle de lHomme, 1777
Volume XXXIV (Suppléments V) : Des Époques de la nature, 1779
Volume XXXV (Suppléments VI) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1782
Volume XXXVI (Suppléments VII) : Servant de suite à lHistoire des Animaux quadrupèdes, 1789
Histoire Naturelle des Quadrupèdes ovipares et des Serpents (Egg-laying Quadrupeds and Snakes) (1788–1789)

The Gecko, 1788
Volume XXXVII (Reptiles I) : Histoire générale et particulière des Quadrupèdes ovipares, 1788
Volume XXXVIII (Reptiles II) : Histoire des Serpents, 1789

Histoire Naturelle des Poissons (Fish) (1798–1803) 
Volume XXXIX (Poissons I) : 1798
Volume XXXX (Poissons II) : 1800
Volume XXXXI (Poissons III) : 1802
Volume XXXXII (Poissons IV) : 1802
Volume XXXXIII (Poissons V) : 1803

Histoire Naturelle des Cétacés (Cetaceans) (1804) 
Volume XXXXIV (Cétacés) : 1804

• Title : Martin-Chasseur Gaudichaud: (Dacelo Gaudichaud. N.)
• Ref #:  31741
• Size: 18in x 12in (460mm x 305mm)
• Date : 1824
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition

Description:
This magnificent large hand coloured original copper-plate engraved antique print of The Rufous-Bellied Kookaburra of Australia & Papua New Guinea (Plate no. 25) by Paul-Louis Oudart (visited by Louis Freycinet in late 1818) was engraved by Jean-Louis-Denis Coutant (1776-1831) and published in the 1824 1st edition of Louis De Freycinets Atlas of Mammals, Birds etc Voyage autour du monde fait par ordre du Roi sur les corvettes de S. M. l\'Uranie et la Physicienne, pendant les années 1817, 1818, 1819 et 1820
These magnificent large hand coloured 1st edition engravings are extremely scarce and a must for ny collection.

The Rufous-Bellied Kookaburra (Dacelo gaudichaud), originally known as Gaudichauds kookaburra after the French botanist Charles Gaudichaud-Beaupré, is a species of kookaburra which is widely distributed through the forests of lowland New Guinea. It has also been recorded on Saibai Island, Queensland, Australia.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, green, blue, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 18in x 12in (460mm x 305mm)
Plate size: - 13in x 9 ½in (330mm x 240mm)
Margins: - Min 2in (50mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - Light soiling & spotting
Plate area: - None
Verso: - Light soiling & spotting

Background: 
After the Restoration the French government gave Freycinet, then a captain, command of another expedition to circumnavigate the globe and conduct research into the shape of the earth, meteorology and terrestrial magnetism. He sailed from Toulon on 17 September 1817 in L Uranie with his wife Rose who secreted herself aboard, and who wrote a separate account of the voyage. After refreshing at the Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius he landed at Shark Bay, Western Australia on 12 September 1818 where he set up an observatory, thoroughly surveyed the inlets and the coastal districts and removed the plate left by Willem de Vlamingh, which he had found and re-erected in 1801. He then sailed north to Timor. His accounts and description of the landscape and life and customs of that and other islands in the East Indies captivated the attention of people in Europe much more than his Australian reports, and a widespread interest developed in the expedition. Leaving Timor on 27 November he sailed via the Moluccas, the Carolines, the Marianas, and the Sandwich Islands and reached Port Jackson on 19 November 1819, the scientists on board adding constantly to their store of information on hydrography, botany, cartography and anthropology. After spending Christmas ashore, they sailed on 26 December and, falling in with the westerlies, set a course for Cape Horn.
On 13 February 1820 L Uranie was wrecked on the Falkland Islands; the scientific records and notes were saved before the vessel foundered, but 2500 of the 4175 plant specimens were lost. Freycinet returned to France in November 1820 and died on 18 August 1842.
There is no evidence in the expedition\'s records or French governmental archives to suggest that there were political objectives in this circumnavigation but, though its purpose was to engage in scientific discovery, this first major voyage undertaken by the restored Bourbons did show the French flag in distant seas and foreshadowed a series of other expeditions which were not wholly scientific.

• Title : Choucari Vert; (Graucalus Viridis)
• Ref #:  31742
• Size: 18in x 12in (460mm x 305mm)
• Date : 1824
• Condition: (A) Very Good Condition

Description:
This magnificent large hand coloured original copper-plate engraved antique print of The Yellow Bellied Wood Shrike of Timor (Plate no. 21) by Florent Prévost (visited by Freycinet in November 1818) was engraved by Jean-Louis-Denis Coutant (1776-1831) and published in the 1824 1st edition of Louis De Freycinets Atlas of Mammals, Birds etc Voyage autour du monde fait par ordre du Roi sur les corvettes de S. M. l\'Uranie et la Physicienne, pendant les années 1817, 1818, 1819 et 1820
These magnificent large hand coloured 1st edition engravings are extremely scarce and a must for ny collection.

Florent Prévost (1794 – 1870) was a French naturalist and illustrator. He was assistant naturalist at the Muséum National d Histoire Naturelle. He was the author of various zoological works, including Les Pigeons par Madame Knip (1843) and, with C. L. Lemaire, Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux d\'Europe (1845). He did illustrative work in books by Coenraad Jacob Temminck (1778–1858), Charles Lucien Bonaparte (1803–1857) and Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707–1788).
He worked on the birds from the voyage of La Venus with Marc Athanese Parfait Oeillet Des Murs, and on the birds and mammals brought back from the French expedition to Abyssinia between 1839 and 1843.
Prevost\'s ground sparrow (Melozone biarcuatum), Prevost\'s squirrel (Callosciurus prevostii), and Gerard\'s water snake (Gerarda prevostiana) are named after him

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, green, blue, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 18in x 12in (460mm x 305mm)
Plate size: - 13in x 9 ½in (330mm x 240mm)
Margins: - Min 2in (50mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - Light soiling & spotting
Plate area: - None
Verso: - Light soiling & spotting

Background: 
After the Restoration the French government gave Freycinet, then a captain, command of another expedition to circumnavigate the globe and conduct research into the shape of the earth, meteorology and terrestrial magnetism. He sailed from Toulon on 17 September 1817 in L Uranie with his wife Rose who secreted herself aboard, and who wrote a separate account of the voyage. After refreshing at the Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius he landed at Shark Bay, Western Australia on 12 September 1818 where he set up an observatory, thoroughly surveyed the inlets and the coastal districts and removed the plate left by Willem de Vlamingh, which he had found and re-erected in 1801. He then sailed north to Timor. His accounts and description of the landscape and life and customs of that and other islands in the East Indies captivated the attention of people in Europe much more than his Australian reports, and a widespread interest developed in the expedition. Leaving Timor on 27 November he sailed via the Moluccas, the Carolines, the Marianas, and the Sandwich Islands and reached Port Jackson on 19 November 1819, the scientists on board adding constantly to their store of information on hydrography, botany, cartography and anthropology. After spending Christmas ashore, they sailed on 26 December and, falling in with the westerlies, set a course for Cape Horn.
On 13 February 1820 L Uranie was wrecked on the Falkland Islands; the scientific records and notes were saved before the vessel foundered, but 2500 of the 4175 plant specimens were lost. Freycinet returned to France in November 1820 and died on 18 August 1842.
There is no evidence in the expedition\'s records or French governmental archives to suggest that there were political objectives in this circumnavigation but, though its purpose was to engage in scientific discovery, this first major voyage undertaken by the restored Bourbons did show the French flag in distant seas and foreshadowed a series of other expeditions which were not wholly scientific.

• Title : Puffinus Brevicaudus, Brandt....J Gould. H C Richter....Hullmandel & Walton Imp...
• Size: 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1840-48
• Ref #:  93107

Description:
This beautiful original hand coloured antique lithograph print of the Short Tailed Petrel, commonly know as the Mutton Bird, by John Gould and Henry Constantine Richter, after the drawing of Elizabeth Gould, was published in The Birds of Australia by John Gould between 1840 & 1848.
This, as with all Goulds prints, is of exceptional quality with exquisite hand colouring. This print is also accompanied by the original text page.

Henry Constantine Richter 1821 – 1902 was an English zoological illustrator who produced a very large number of skilful coloured lithographs of birds and mammals, mainly for the scientific books of the renowned English 19th century ornithologist John Gould.
Many of the original drawings used by Richter as the basis for his coloured lithographs were by Goulds wife, Elizabeth Coxen, produced before her death in 1841.
Richter\'s reputation was overshadowed by that of his much-celebrated employer. Since it was not customary to acknowledge illustrators alongside authors in the titles of publications, his name was forgotten. But in 1978 his great ability and the extent of his contribution to Goulds work came to light, in the work of the researcher Christine E Jackson.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, green, blue, pink, brown, white
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Plate size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
The Birds of Australia was a book written by John Gould and published in seven volumes between 1840 and 1848. It was the first comprehensive survey of the birds of Australia and included descriptions of 681 species, 328 of which were new to science and were first described by Gould.
Gould and his wife Elizabeth traveled to Australia from England in 1838 to prepare the book. They spent a little under two years collecting specimens for the book. John traveled widely and made extensive collections of Australian birds and other fauna. Elizabeth, who had illustrated several of his earlier works, made hundreds of drawings from specimens for publication in The Birds of Australia
The plates of the book were produced by lithography, Elizabeth produced 84 plates before she died in 1841, Edward Lear produced one, Waterhouse Hawkins contributed one and the remaining 595 plates were produced by H. C. Richter from Elizabeths drawings and were published under his name.
250 sets of the seven-volume work were printed.
In 1865 Gould published a revised and updated version of the text of The Birds of Australia in the two-volume Handbook to the Birds of Australia.

Gould, John FRS 1804 – 1881
Gould was an English ornithologist and bird artist. He published a number of monographs on birds, illustrated by plates that he produced with the assistance of his wife, Elizabeth Gould, and several other artists including Edward Lear, Henry Constantine Richter, Joseph Wolf and William Matthew Hart. He has been considered the father of bird study in Australia and the Gould League in Australia is named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed Darwins finches played a role in the inception of Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection. Goulds work is referenced in Charles Darwins book, On the Origin of Species.
Gould was born in Lyme Regis the first son of a gardener. He and the boy probably had a scanty education. Shortly afterwards his father obtained a position on an estate near Guildford, Surrey, and then in 1818 Gould became foreman in the Royal Gardens of Windsor. He was for some time under the care of J. T. Aiton, of the Royal Gardens of Windsor. The young Gould started training as a gardener, being employed under his father at Windsor from 1818 to 1824, and he was subsequently a gardener at Ripley Castle in Yorkshire. He became an expert in the art of taxidermy. In 1824 he set himself up in business in London as a taxidermist, and his skill helped him to become the first Curator and Preserver at the museum of the Zoological Society of London in 1827.
Goulds position brought him into contact with the countrys leading naturalists. This meant that he was often the first to see new collections of birds given to the Zoological Society of London. In 1830 a collection of birds arrived from the Himalayas, many not previously described. Gould published these birds in A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains (1830–1832). The text was by Nicholas Aylward Vigors and the illustrations were drawn and lithographed by Goulds wife Elizabeth Coxen Gould. Most of Goulds work were rough sketches on paper from which other artists created the lithographic plates.
This work was followed by four more in the next seven years, including Birds of Europe in five volumes. It was completed in 1837; Gould wrote the text, and his clerk, Edwin Prince, did the editing. The plates were drawn and lithographed by Elizabeth Coxen Gould. A few of the illustrations were made by Edward Lear as part of his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae in 1832. Lear, however, was in financial difficulty, and he sold the entire set of lithographs to Gould. The books were published in a very large size, imperial folio, with magnificent coloured plates. Eventually 41 of these volumes were published, with about 3000 plates. They appeared in parts at £3 3s. a number, subscribed for in advance, and in spite of the heavy expense of preparing the plates, Gould succeeded in making his ventures pay, realising a fortune. This was a busy period for Gould who also published Icones Avium in two parts containing 18 leaves of bird studies on 54 cm plates as a supplement to his previous works. No further monographs were published as in 1838 he and his wife moved to Australia to work on the Birds of Australia. Shortly after their return to England, his wife died in 1841. Elizabeth Gould completed 84 plates for Birds of Australia before her death.
When Charles Darwin presented his mammal and bird specimens collected during the second voyage of HMS Beagle to the Zoological Society of London on 4 January 1837, the bird specimens were given to Gould for identification. He set aside his paying work and at the next meeting on 10 January reported that birds from the Galápagos Islands which Darwin had thought were blackbirds, gross-bills and finches were in fact a series of ground Finches which are so peculiar as to form an entirely new group, containing 12 species. This story made the newspapers. In March, Darwin met Gould again, learning that his Galápagos wren was another species of finch and the mockingbirds he had labelled by island were separate species rather than just varieties, with relatives on the South American mainland. Subsequently, Gould advised that the smaller southern Rhea specimen that had been rescued from a Christmas dinner was a separate species which he named Rhea darwinii, whose territory overlapped with the northern rheas. Darwin had not bothered to label his finches by island, but others on the expedition had taken more care. He now sought specimens collected by captain Robert FitzRoy and crewmen. From them he was able to establish that the species were unique to islands, an important step on the inception of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Goulds work on the birds was published between 1838 and 1842 in five numbers as Part 3 of Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, edited by Charles Darwin. Elizabeth Gould illustrated all the plates for Part 3.
In 1838 the Goulds sailed to Australia, intending to study the birds of that country and be the first to produce a major work on the subject. They took with them the collector John Gilbert. They arrived in Tasmania in September, making the acquaintance of the governor Sir John Franklin and his wife. Gould and Gilbert collected on the island. In February 1839 Gould sailed to Sydney, leaving his pregnant wife with the Franklins. He travelled to his brother-in-laws station at Yarrundi, spending his time searching for bowerbirds in the Liverpool Range. In April he returned to Tasmania for the birth of his son. In May he sailed to Adelaide to meet Charles Sturt, who was preparing to lead an expedition to the Murray River. Gould collected in the Mount Lofty range, the Murray Scrubs and Kangaroo Island, returning again to Hobart in July. He then travelled with his wife to Yarrundi. They returned home to England in May 1840.
The result of the trip was The Birds of Australia (1840–48). It included a total of 600 plates in seven volumes; 328 of the species described were new to science and named by Gould. He also published A Monograph of the Macropodidae, or Family of Kangaroos (1841–1842) and the three volume work The Mammals of Australia (1849–1861).
Elizabeth died in 1841 after the birth of their eighth child, Sarah, and Goulds books subsequently used illustrations by a number of artists, including Henry Constantine Richter, William Matthew Hart and Joseph Wolf.
Throughout his professional life Gould had a strong interest in hummingbirds. He accumulated a collection of 320 species, which he exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Despite his interest, Gould had never seen a live hummingbird. In May 1857 he travelled to the United States with his second son, Charles. He arrived in New York too early in the season to see hummingbirds in that city, but on 21 May 1857, in Bartrams Gardens in Philadelphia, he finally saw his first live one, a ruby-throated hummingbird. He then continued to Washington D.C. where he saw large numbers in the gardens of the Capitol. Gould attempted to return to England with live specimens, but, as he was not aware of the conditions necessary to keep them, they only lived for two months at most.
Gould published: A Monograph of the Trochilidae or Humming Birds with 360 plates (1849–61); The Mammals of Australia (1845–63), Handbook to the Birds of Australia (1865), The Birds of Asia (1850–83), The Birds of Great Britain (1862–73) and The Birds of New Guinea and the adjacent Papuan Islands (1875–88).
The University of Glasgow, which owns a copy of Birds of Great Britain, describes John Gould as the greatest figure in bird illustration after Audubon, and auctioneers Sotherans describe the work as Goulds pride and joy.
Gould had already published some of the illustrations in Birds of Europe, but Birds of Great Britain represents a development of his aesthetic style in which he adds illustrations of nests and young on a large scale.
Sotherans Co. reports that Gould published the book himself, producing 750 copies, which remain sought after both as complete volumes, and as individual plates, currently varying in price from £450 – £850. The University of Glasgow records that the volumes were issued in London in 25 parts, to make the complete set, between 1863 and 1873, and each set contained 367 coloured lithographs.
Gould undertook an ornithological tour of Scandinavia in 1856, in preparation for the work, taking with him the artist Henry Wolf who drew 57 of the plates from Goulds preparatory sketches. According to The University of Glasgow Goulds skill was in rapidly producing rough sketches from nature (a majority of the sketches were drawn from newly killed specimens) capturing the distinctiveness of each species. Gould then oversaw the process whereby his artists worked his sketches up into the finished drawings, which were made into coloured lithographs by engraver William Hart.
There were problems: the stone engraving of the snowy owl in volume I was dropped and broken at an early stage in the printing. Later issues of this plate show evidence of this damage and consequently the early issue – printed before the accident – are considered more desirable.
The lithographs were hand coloured. In the introduction for the work, Gould states every sky with its varied tints and every feather of each bird were coloured by hand; and when it is considered that nearly two hundred and eighty thousand illustrations in the present work have been so treated, it will most likely cause some astonishment to those who give the subject a thought.
The work has gathered critical acclaim: according to Mullens and Swann, Birds of Great Britain is the most sumptuous and costly of British bird books, whilst Wood describes it as a magnificent work. Isabella Tree writes that it was seen – perhaps partly because its subject was British, as the culmination of [his] ... genius

• Title : Procellaria Gigantea, Gmel....J Gould. H C Richter....Hullmandel & Walton Imp...
• Size: 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1840-48
• Ref #:  93103

Description:
This beautiful original hand coloured antique lithograph print of the Southern Giant Petrel, commonly know as the Stinker or Glutton, by John Gould and Henry Constantine Richter, after the drawing of Elizabeth Gould, was published in The Birds of Australia by John Gould between 1840 & 1848.
This, as with all Goulds prints, is of exceptional quality with exquisite hand colouring. This print is also accompanied by the original text page.

Henry Constantine Richter 1821 – 1902 was an English zoological illustrator who produced a very large number of skilful coloured lithographs of birds and mammals, mainly for the scientific books of the renowned English 19th century ornithologist John Gould.
Many of the original drawings used by Richter as the basis for his coloured lithographs were by Goulds wife, Elizabeth Coxen, produced before her death in 1841.
Richters reputation was overshadowed by that of his much-celebrated employer. Since it was not customary to acknowledge illustrators alongside authors in the titles of publications, his name was forgotten. But in 1978 his great ability and the extent of his contribution to Goulds work came to light, in the work of the researcher Christine E Jackson.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, green, blue, pink, brown, white
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Plate size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - Light age toning in margins
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
The Birds of Australia was a book written by John Gould and published in seven volumes between 1840 and 1848. It was the first comprehensive survey of the birds of Australia and included descriptions of 681 species, 328 of which were new to science and were first described by Gould.
Gould and his wife Elizabeth traveled to Australia from England in 1838 to prepare the book. They spent a little under two years collecting specimens for the book. John traveled widely and made extensive collections of Australian birds and other fauna. Elizabeth, who had illustrated several of his earlier works, made hundreds of drawings from specimens for publication in The Birds of Australia
The plates of the book were produced by lithography, Elizabeth produced 84 plates before she died in 1841, Edward Lear produced one, Waterhouse Hawkins contributed one and the remaining 595 plates were produced by H. C. Richter from Elizabeths drawings and were published under his name.
250 sets of the seven-volume work were printed.
In 1865 Gould published a revised and updated version of the text of The Birds of Australia in the two-volume Handbook to the Birds of Australia.

Gould, John FRS 1804 – 1881
Gould was an English ornithologist and bird artist. He published a number of monographs on birds, illustrated by plates that he produced with the assistance of his wife, Elizabeth Gould, and several other artists including Edward Lear, Henry Constantine Richter, Joseph Wolf and William Matthew Hart. He has been considered the father of bird study in Australia and the Gould League in Australia is named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed Darwins finches played a role in the inception of Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection. Goulds work is referenced in Charles Darwins book, On the Origin of Species.
Gould was born in Lyme Regis the first son of a gardener. He and the boy probably had a scanty education. Shortly afterwards his father obtained a position on an estate near Guildford, Surrey, and then in 1818 Gould became foreman in the Royal Gardens of Windsor. He was for some time under the care of J. T. Aiton, of the Royal Gardens of Windsor. The young Gould started training as a gardener, being employed under his father at Windsor from 1818 to 1824, and he was subsequently a gardener at Ripley Castle in Yorkshire. He became an expert in the art of taxidermy. In 1824 he set himself up in business in London as a taxidermist, and his skill helped him to become the first Curator and Preserver at the museum of the Zoological Society of London in 1827.
Goulds position brought him into contact with the countrys leading naturalists. This meant that he was often the first to see new collections of birds given to the Zoological Society of London. In 1830 a collection of birds arrived from the Himalayas, many not previously described. Gould published these birds in A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains (1830–1832). The text was by Nicholas Aylward Vigors and the illustrations were drawn and lithographed by Goulds wife Elizabeth Coxen Gould. Most of Goulds work were rough sketches on paper from which other artists created the lithographic plates.
This work was followed by four more in the next seven years, including Birds of Europe in five volumes. It was completed in 1837; Gould wrote the text, and his clerk, Edwin Prince, did the editing. The plates were drawn and lithographed by Elizabeth Coxen Gould. A few of the illustrations were made by Edward Lear as part of his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae in 1832. Lear, however, was in financial difficulty, and he sold the entire set of lithographs to Gould. The books were published in a very large size, imperial folio, with magnificent coloured plates. Eventually 41 of these volumes were published, with about 3000 plates. They appeared in parts at £3 3s. a number, subscribed for in advance, and in spite of the heavy expense of preparing the plates, Gould succeeded in making his ventures pay, realising a fortune. This was a busy period for Gould who also published Icones Avium in two parts containing 18 leaves of bird studies on 54 cm plates as a supplement to his previous works. No further monographs were published as in 1838 he and his wife moved to Australia to work on the Birds of Australia. Shortly after their return to England, his wife died in 1841. Elizabeth Gould completed 84 plates for Birds of Australia before her death.
When Charles Darwin presented his mammal and bird specimens collected during the second voyage of HMS Beagle to the Zoological Society of London on 4 January 1837, the bird specimens were given to Gould for identification. He set aside his paying work and at the next meeting on 10 January reported that birds from the Galápagos Islands which Darwin had thought were blackbirds, gross-bills and finches were in fact a series of ground Finches which are so peculiar as to form an entirely new group, containing 12 species. This story made the newspapers. In March, Darwin met Gould again, learning that his Galápagos wren was another species of finch and the mockingbirds he had labelled by island were separate species rather than just varieties, with relatives on the South American mainland. Subsequently, Gould advised that the smaller southern Rhea specimen that had been rescued from a Christmas dinner was a separate species which he named Rhea darwinii, whose territory overlapped with the northern rheas. Darwin had not bothered to label his finches by island, but others on the expedition had taken more care. He now sought specimens collected by captain Robert FitzRoy and crewmen. From them he was able to establish that the species were unique to islands, an important step on the inception of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Goulds work on the birds was published between 1838 and 1842 in five numbers as Part 3 of Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, edited by Charles Darwin. Elizabeth Gould illustrated all the plates for Part 3.
In 1838 the Goulds sailed to Australia, intending to study the birds of that country and be the first to produce a major work on the subject. They took with them the collector John Gilbert. They arrived in Tasmania in September, making the acquaintance of the governor Sir John Franklin and his wife. Gould and Gilbert collected on the island. In February 1839 Gould sailed to Sydney, leaving his pregnant wife with the Franklins. He travelled to his brother-in-laws station at Yarrundi, spending his time searching for bowerbirds in the Liverpool Range. In April he returned to Tasmania for the birth of his son. In May he sailed to Adelaide to meet Charles Sturt, who was preparing to lead an expedition to the Murray River. Gould collected in the Mount Lofty range, the Murray Scrubs and Kangaroo Island, returning again to Hobart in July. He then travelled with his wife to Yarrundi. They returned home to England in May 1840.
The result of the trip was The Birds of Australia (1840–48). It included a total of 600 plates in seven volumes; 328 of the species described were new to science and named by Gould. He also published A Monograph of the Macropodidae, or Family of Kangaroos (1841–1842) and the three volume work The Mammals of Australia (1849–1861).
Elizabeth died in 1841 after the birth of their eighth child, Sarah, and Goulds books subsequently used illustrations by a number of artists, including Henry Constantine Richter, William Matthew Hart and Joseph Wolf.
Throughout his professional life Gould had a strong interest in hummingbirds. He accumulated a collection of 320 species, which he exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Despite his interest, Gould had never seen a live hummingbird. In May 1857 he travelled to the United States with his second son, Charles. He arrived in New York too early in the season to see hummingbirds in that city, but on 21 May 1857, in Bartrams Gardens in Philadelphia, he finally saw his first live one, a ruby-throated hummingbird. He then continued to Washington D.C. where he saw large numbers in the gardens of the Capitol. Gould attempted to return to England with live specimens, but, as he was not aware of the conditions necessary to keep them, they only lived for two months at most.
Gould published: A Monograph of the Trochilidae or Humming Birds with 360 plates (1849–61); The Mammals of Australia (1845–63), Handbook to the Birds of Australia (1865), The Birds of Asia (1850–83), The Birds of Great Britain (1862–73) and The Birds of New Guinea and the adjacent Papuan Islands (1875–88).
The University of Glasgow, which owns a copy of Birds of Great Britain, describes John Gould as the greatest figure in bird illustration after Audubon, and auctioneers Sotherans describe the work as Goulds pride and joy.
Gould had already published some of the illustrations in Birds of Europe, but Birds of Great Britain represents a development of his aesthetic style in which he adds illustrations of nests and young on a large scale.
Sotherans Co. reports that Gould published the book himself, producing 750 copies, which remain sought after both as complete volumes, and as individual plates, currently varying in price from £450 – £850. The University of Glasgow records that the volumes were issued in London in 25 parts, to make the complete set, between 1863 and 1873, and each set contained 367 coloured lithographs.
Gould undertook an ornithological tour of Scandinavia in 1856, in preparation for the work, taking with him the artist Henry Wolf who drew 57 of the plates from Goulds preparatory sketches. According to The University of Glasgow Goulds skill was in rapidly producing rough sketches from nature (a majority of the sketches were drawn from newly killed specimens) capturing the distinctiveness of each species. Gould then oversaw the process whereby his artists worked his sketches up into the finished drawings, which were made into coloured lithographs by engraver William Hart.
There were problems: the stone engraving of the snowy owl in volume I was dropped and broken at an early stage in the printing. Later issues of this plate show evidence of this damage and consequently the early issue – printed before the accident – are considered more desirable.
The lithographs were hand coloured. In the introduction for the work, Gould states every sky with its varied tints and every feather of each bird were coloured by hand; and when it is considered that nearly two hundred and eighty thousand illustrations in the present work have been so treated, it will most likely cause some astonishment to those who give the subject a thought.
The work has gathered critical acclaim: according to Mullens and Swann, Birds of Great Britain is the most sumptuous and costly of British bird books, whilst Wood describes it as a magnificent work. Isabella Tree writes that it was seen – perhaps partly because its subject was British, as the culmination of [his] ... genius

• Title : Podargus Ocellatus, Quoy et Gain....W Hart del a lith....Mintern Bros imp
• Size: 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1840-48
• Ref #:  93100

Description:
This beautiful original hand coloured antique lithograph print of the Marbled Frogmouth, by John Gould and William Hart, after the drawing of Elizabeth Gould, was published in The Birds of Australia by John Gould between 1840 & 1848.
This, as with all Goulds prints, is of exceptional quality with exquisite hand colouring. This print is also accompanied by the original text page.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, green, blue, pink, brown, white
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Plate size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
The Birds of Australia was a book written by John Gould and published in seven volumes between 1840 and 1848. It was the first comprehensive survey of the birds of Australia and included descriptions of 681 species, 328 of which were new to science and were first described by Gould.
Gould and his wife Elizabeth traveled to Australia from England in 1838 to prepare the book. They spent a little under two years collecting specimens for the book. John traveled widely and made extensive collections of Australian birds and other fauna. Elizabeth, who had illustrated several of his earlier works, made hundreds of drawings from specimens for publication in The Birds of Australia
The plates of the book were produced by lithography, Elizabeth produced 84 plates before she died in 1841, Edward Lear produced one, Waterhouse Hawkins contributed one and the remaining 595 plates were produced by H. C. Richter from Elizabeths drawings and were published under his name.
250 sets of the seven-volume work were printed.
In 1865 Gould published a revised and updated version of the text of The Birds of Australia in the two-volume Handbook to the Birds of Australia.

Gould, John FRS 1804 – 1881
Gould was an English ornithologist and bird artist. He published a number of monographs on birds, illustrated by plates that he produced with the assistance of his wife, Elizabeth Gould, and several other artists including Edward Lear, Henry Constantine Richter, Joseph Wolf and William Matthew Hart. He has been considered the father of bird study in Australia and the Gould League in Australia is named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed Darwins finches played a role in the inception of Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection. Goulds work is referenced in Charles Darwins book, On the Origin of Species.
Gould was born in Lyme Regis the first son of a gardener. He and the boy probably had a scanty education. Shortly afterwards his father obtained a position on an estate near Guildford, Surrey, and then in 1818 Gould became foreman in the Royal Gardens of Windsor. He was for some time under the care of J. T. Aiton, of the Royal Gardens of Windsor. The young Gould started training as a gardener, being employed under his father at Windsor from 1818 to 1824, and he was subsequently a gardener at Ripley Castle in Yorkshire. He became an expert in the art of taxidermy. In 1824 he set himself up in business in London as a taxidermist, and his skill helped him to become the first Curator and Preserver at the museum of the Zoological Society of London in 1827.
Goulds position brought him into contact with the countrys leading naturalists. This meant that he was often the first to see new collections of birds given to the Zoological Society of London. In 1830 a collection of birds arrived from the Himalayas, many not previously described. Gould published these birds in A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains (1830–1832). The text was by Nicholas Aylward Vigors and the illustrations were drawn and lithographed by Goulds wife Elizabeth Coxen Gould. Most of Goulds work were rough sketches on paper from which other artists created the lithographic plates.
This work was followed by four more in the next seven years, including Birds of Europe in five volumes. It was completed in 1837; Gould wrote the text, and his clerk, Edwin Prince, did the editing. The plates were drawn and lithographed by Elizabeth Coxen Gould. A few of the illustrations were made by Edward Lear as part of his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae in 1832. Lear, however, was in financial difficulty, and he sold the entire set of lithographs to Gould. The books were published in a very large size, imperial folio, with magnificent coloured plates. Eventually 41 of these volumes were published, with about 3000 plates. They appeared in parts at £3 3s. a number, subscribed for in advance, and in spite of the heavy expense of preparing the plates, Gould succeeded in making his ventures pay, realising a fortune. This was a busy period for Gould who also published Icones Avium in two parts containing 18 leaves of bird studies on 54 cm plates as a supplement to his previous works. No further monographs were published as in 1838 he and his wife moved to Australia to work on the Birds of Australia. Shortly after their return to England, his wife died in 1841. Elizabeth Gould completed 84 plates for Birds of Australia before her death.
When Charles Darwin presented his mammal and bird specimens collected during the second voyage of HMS Beagle to the Zoological Society of London on 4 January 1837, the bird specimens were given to Gould for identification. He set aside his paying work and at the next meeting on 10 January reported that birds from the Galápagos Islands which Darwin had thought were blackbirds, gross-bills and finches were in fact a series of ground Finches which are so peculiar as to form an entirely new group, containing 12 species. This story made the newspapers. In March, Darwin met Gould again, learning that his Galápagos wren was another species of finch and the mockingbirds he had labelled by island were separate species rather than just varieties, with relatives on the South American mainland. Subsequently, Gould advised that the smaller southern Rhea specimen that had been rescued from a Christmas dinner was a separate species which he named Rhea darwinii, whose territory overlapped with the northern rheas. Darwin had not bothered to label his finches by island, but others on the expedition had taken more care. He now sought specimens collected by captain Robert FitzRoy and crewmen. From them he was able to establish that the species were unique to islands, an important step on the inception of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Goulds work on the birds was published between 1838 and 1842 in five numbers as Part 3 of Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, edited by Charles Darwin. Elizabeth Gould illustrated all the plates for Part 3.
In 1838 the Goulds sailed to Australia, intending to study the birds of that country and be the first to produce a major work on the subject. They took with them the collector John Gilbert. They arrived in Tasmania in September, making the acquaintance of the governor Sir John Franklin and his wife. Gould and Gilbert collected on the island. In February 1839 Gould sailed to Sydney, leaving his pregnant wife with the Franklins. He travelled to his brother-in-laws station at Yarrundi, spending his time searching for bowerbirds in the Liverpool Range. In April he returned to Tasmania for the birth of his son. In May he sailed to Adelaide to meet Charles Sturt, who was preparing to lead an expedition to the Murray River. Gould collected in the Mount Lofty range, the Murray Scrubs and Kangaroo Island, returning again to Hobart in July. He then travelled with his wife to Yarrundi. They returned home to England in May 1840.
The result of the trip was The Birds of Australia (1840–48). It included a total of 600 plates in seven volumes; 328 of the species described were new to science and named by Gould. He also published A Monograph of the Macropodidae, or Family of Kangaroos (1841–1842) and the three volume work The Mammals of Australia (1849–1861).
Elizabeth died in 1841 after the birth of their eighth child, Sarah, and Goulds books subsequently used illustrations by a number of artists, including Henry Constantine Richter, William Matthew Hart and Joseph Wolf.
Throughout his professional life Gould had a strong interest in hummingbirds. He accumulated a collection of 320 species, which he exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Despite his interest, Gould had never seen a live hummingbird. In May 1857 he travelled to the United States with his second son, Charles. He arrived in New York too early in the season to see hummingbirds in that city, but on 21 May 1857, in Bartrams Gardens in Philadelphia, he finally saw his first live one, a ruby-throated hummingbird. He then continued to Washington D.C. where he saw large numbers in the gardens of the Capitol. Gould attempted to return to England with live specimens, but, as he was not aware of the conditions necessary to keep them, they only lived for two months at most.
Gould published: A Monograph of the Trochilidae or Humming Birds with 360 plates (1849–61); The Mammals of Australia (1845–63), Handbook to the Birds of Australia (1865), The Birds of Asia (1850–83), The Birds of Great Britain (1862–73) and The Birds of New Guinea and the adjacent Papuan Islands (1875–88).
The University of Glasgow, which owns a copy of Birds of Great Britain, describes John Gould as the greatest figure in bird illustration after Audubon, and auctioneers Sotherans describe the work as Goulds pride and joy.
Gould had already published some of the illustrations in Birds of Europe, but Birds of Great Britain represents a development of his aesthetic style in which he adds illustrations of nests and young on a large scale.
Sotherans Co. reports that Gould published the book himself, producing 750 copies, which remain sought after both as complete volumes, and as individual plates, currently varying in price from £450 – £850. The University of Glasgow records that the volumes were issued in London in 25 parts, to make the complete set, between 1863 and 1873, and each set contained 367 coloured lithographs.
Gould undertook an ornithological tour of Scandinavia in 1856, in preparation for the work, taking with him the artist Henry Wolf who drew 57 of the plates from Goulds preparatory sketches. According to The University of Glasgow Goulds skill was in rapidly producing rough sketches from nature (a majority of the sketches were drawn from newly killed specimens) capturing the distinctiveness of each species. Gould then oversaw the process whereby his artists worked his sketches up into the finished drawings, which were made into coloured lithographs by engraver William Hart.
There were problems: the stone engraving of the snowy owl in volume I was dropped and broken at an early stage in the printing. Later issues of this plate show evidence of this damage and consequently the early issue – printed before the accident – are considered more desirable.
The lithographs were hand coloured. In the introduction for the work, Gould states every sky with its varied tints and every feather of each bird were coloured by hand; and when it is considered that nearly two hundred and eighty thousand illustrations in the present work have been so treated, it will most likely cause some astonishment to those who give the subject a thought.
The work has gathered critical acclaim: according to Mullens and Swann, Birds of Great Britain is the most sumptuous and costly of British bird books, whilst Wood describes it as a magnificent work. Isabella Tree writes that it was seen – perhaps partly because its subject was British, as the culmination of [his] ... genius

• Title : Prion Turtur....J Gould. H C Richter....Hullmandel Imp...
• Size: 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1840-48
• Ref #:  93105

Description:
This beautiful original hand coloured antique lithograph print of the Sea Bird, the Dove or Antarctic Prion by John Gould and Henry Constantine Richter, after the drawing of Elizabeth Gould, was published in The Birds of Australia by John Gould between 1840 & 1848.
This, as with all Goulds prints, is of exceptional quality with exquisite hand colouring. This print is also accompanied by the original text page..

Henry Constantine Richter 1821 – 1902 was an English zoological illustrator who produced a very large number of skilful coloured lithographs of birds and mammals, mainly for the scientific books of the renowned English 19th century ornithologist John Gould.
Many of the original drawings used by Richter as the basis for his coloured lithographs were by Goulds wife, Elizabeth Coxen, produced before her death in 1841.
Richter\'s reputation was overshadowed by that of his much-celebrated employer. Since it was not customary to acknowledge illustrators alongside authors in the titles of publications, his name was forgotten. But in 1978 his great ability and the extent of his contribution to Goulds work came to light, in the work of the researcher Christine E Jackson.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, green, blue, pink, brown, white
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Plate size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
The Birds of Australia was a book written by John Gould and published in seven volumes between 1840 and 1848. It was the first comprehensive survey of the birds of Australia and included descriptions of 681 species, 328 of which were new to science and were first described by Gould.
Gould and his wife Elizabeth traveled to Australia from England in 1838 to prepare the book. They spent a little under two years collecting specimens for the book. John traveled widely and made extensive collections of Australian birds and other fauna. Elizabeth, who had illustrated several of his earlier works, made hundreds of drawings from specimens for publication in The Birds of Australia
The plates of the book were produced by lithography, Elizabeth produced 84 plates before she died in 1841, Edward Lear produced one, Waterhouse Hawkins contributed one and the remaining 595 plates were produced by H. C. Richter from Elizabeths drawings and were published under his name.
250 sets of the seven-volume work were printed.
In 1865 Gould published a revised and updated version of the text of The Birds of Australia in the two-volume Handbook to the Birds of Australia.

Gould, John FRS 1804 – 1881
Gould was an English ornithologist and bird artist. He published a number of monographs on birds, illustrated by plates that he produced with the assistance of his wife, Elizabeth Gould, and several other artists including Edward Lear, Henry Constantine Richter, Joseph Wolf and William Matthew Hart. He has been considered the father of bird study in Australia and the Gould League in Australia is named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed Darwins finches played a role in the inception of Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection. Goulds work is referenced in Charles Darwins book, On the Origin of Species.
Gould was born in Lyme Regis the first son of a gardener. He and the boy probably had a scanty education. Shortly afterwards his father obtained a position on an estate near Guildford, Surrey, and then in 1818 Gould became foreman in the Royal Gardens of Windsor. He was for some time under the care of J. T. Aiton, of the Royal Gardens of Windsor. The young Gould started training as a gardener, being employed under his father at Windsor from 1818 to 1824, and he was subsequently a gardener at Ripley Castle in Yorkshire. He became an expert in the art of taxidermy. In 1824 he set himself up in business in London as a taxidermist, and his skill helped him to become the first Curator and Preserver at the museum of the Zoological Society of London in 1827.
Goulds position brought him into contact with the countrys leading naturalists. This meant that he was often the first to see new collections of birds given to the Zoological Society of London. In 1830 a collection of birds arrived from the Himalayas, many not previously described. Gould published these birds in A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains (1830–1832). The text was by Nicholas Aylward Vigors and the illustrations were drawn and lithographed by Goulds wife Elizabeth Coxen Gould. Most of Goulds work were rough sketches on paper from which other artists created the lithographic plates.
This work was followed by four more in the next seven years, including Birds of Europe in five volumes. It was completed in 1837; Gould wrote the text, and his clerk, Edwin Prince, did the editing. The plates were drawn and lithographed by Elizabeth Coxen Gould. A few of the illustrations were made by Edward Lear as part of his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae in 1832. Lear, however, was in financial difficulty, and he sold the entire set of lithographs to Gould. The books were published in a very large size, imperial folio, with magnificent coloured plates. Eventually 41 of these volumes were published, with about 3000 plates. They appeared in parts at £3 3s. a number, subscribed for in advance, and in spite of the heavy expense of preparing the plates, Gould succeeded in making his ventures pay, realising a fortune. This was a busy period for Gould who also published Icones Avium in two parts containing 18 leaves of bird studies on 54 cm plates as a supplement to his previous works. No further monographs were published as in 1838 he and his wife moved to Australia to work on the Birds of Australia. Shortly after their return to England, his wife died in 1841. Elizabeth Gould completed 84 plates for Birds of Australia before her death.
When Charles Darwin presented his mammal and bird specimens collected during the second voyage of HMS Beagle to the Zoological Society of London on 4 January 1837, the bird specimens were given to Gould for identification. He set aside his paying work and at the next meeting on 10 January reported that birds from the Galápagos Islands which Darwin had thought were blackbirds, gross-bills and finches were in fact a series of ground Finches which are so peculiar as to form an entirely new group, containing 12 species. This story made the newspapers. In March, Darwin met Gould again, learning that his Galápagos wren was another species of finch and the mockingbirds he had labelled by island were separate species rather than just varieties, with relatives on the South American mainland. Subsequently, Gould advised that the smaller southern Rhea specimen that had been rescued from a Christmas dinner was a separate species which he named Rhea darwinii, whose territory overlapped with the northern rheas. Darwin had not bothered to label his finches by island, but others on the expedition had taken more care. He now sought specimens collected by captain Robert FitzRoy and crewmen. From them he was able to establish that the species were unique to islands, an important step on the inception of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Goulds work on the birds was published between 1838 and 1842 in five numbers as Part 3 of Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, edited by Charles Darwin. Elizabeth Gould illustrated all the plates for Part 3.
In 1838 the Goulds sailed to Australia, intending to study the birds of that country and be the first to produce a major work on the subject. They took with them the collector John Gilbert. They arrived in Tasmania in September, making the acquaintance of the governor Sir John Franklin and his wife. Gould and Gilbert collected on the island. In February 1839 Gould sailed to Sydney, leaving his pregnant wife with the Franklins. He travelled to his brother-in-laws station at Yarrundi, spending his time searching for bowerbirds in the Liverpool Range. In April he returned to Tasmania for the birth of his son. In May he sailed to Adelaide to meet Charles Sturt, who was preparing to lead an expedition to the Murray River. Gould collected in the Mount Lofty range, the Murray Scrubs and Kangaroo Island, returning again to Hobart in July. He then travelled with his wife to Yarrundi. They returned home to England in May 1840.
The result of the trip was The Birds of Australia (1840–48). It included a total of 600 plates in seven volumes; 328 of the species described were new to science and named by Gould. He also published A Monograph of the Macropodidae, or Family of Kangaroos (1841–1842) and the three volume work The Mammals of Australia (1849–1861).
Elizabeth died in 1841 after the birth of their eighth child, Sarah, and Goulds books subsequently used illustrations by a number of artists, including Henry Constantine Richter, William Matthew Hart and Joseph Wolf.
Throughout his professional life Gould had a strong interest in hummingbirds. He accumulated a collection of 320 species, which he exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Despite his interest, Gould had never seen a live hummingbird. In May 1857 he travelled to the United States with his second son, Charles. He arrived in New York too early in the season to see hummingbirds in that city, but on 21 May 1857, in Bartrams Gardens in Philadelphia, he finally saw his first live one, a ruby-throated hummingbird. He then continued to Washington D.C. where he saw large numbers in the gardens of the Capitol. Gould attempted to return to England with live specimens, but, as he was not aware of the conditions necessary to keep them, they only lived for two months at most.
Gould published: A Monograph of the Trochilidae or Humming Birds with 360 plates (1849–61); The Mammals of Australia (1845–63), Handbook to the Birds of Australia (1865), The Birds of Asia (1850–83), The Birds of Great Britain (1862–73) and The Birds of New Guinea and the adjacent Papuan Islands (1875–88).
The University of Glasgow, which owns a copy of Birds of Great Britain, describes John Gould as the greatest figure in bird illustration after Audubon, and auctioneers Sotherans describe the work as Goulds pride and joy.
Gould had already published some of the illustrations in Birds of Europe, but Birds of Great Britain represents a development of his aesthetic style in which he adds illustrations of nests and young on a large scale.
Sotherans Co. reports that Gould published the book himself, producing 750 copies, which remain sought after both as complete volumes, and as individual plates, currently varying in price from £450 – £850. The University of Glasgow records that the volumes were issued in London in 25 parts, to make the complete set, between 1863 and 1873, and each set contained 367 coloured lithographs.
Gould undertook an ornithological tour of Scandinavia in 1856, in preparation for the work, taking with him the artist Henry Wolf who drew 57 of the plates from Goulds preparatory sketches. According to The University of Glasgow Goulds skill was in rapidly producing rough sketches from nature (a majority of the sketches were drawn from newly killed specimens) capturing the distinctiveness of each species. Gould then oversaw the process whereby his artists worked his sketches up into the finished drawings, which were made into coloured lithographs by engraver William Hart.
There were problems: the stone engraving of the snowy owl in volume I was dropped and broken at an early stage in the printing. Later issues of this plate show evidence of this damage and consequently the early issue – printed before the accident – are considered more desirable.
The lithographs were hand coloured. In the introduction for the work, Gould states every sky with its varied tints and every feather of each bird were coloured by hand; and when it is considered that nearly two hundred and eighty thousand illustrations in the present work have been so treated, it will most likely cause some astonishment to those who give the subject a thought.
The work has gathered critical acclaim: according to Mullens and Swann, Birds of Great Britain is the most sumptuous and costly of British bird books, whilst Wood describes it as a magnificent work. Isabella Tree writes that it was seen – perhaps partly because its subject was British, as the culmination of [his] ... genius

• Title : Prion Vittatus: Cuv....J Gould. H C Richter....Hullmandel & Walton Imp...
• Size: 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1840-48
• Ref #:  93106

Description:
This beautiful original hand coloured antique lithograph print of the Sea Bird, Broad Billed Prion by John Gould and Henry Constantine Richter, after the drawing of Elizabeth Gould, was published in The Birds of Australia by John Gould between 1840 & 1848.
This, as with all Goulds prints, is of exceptional quality with exquisite hand colouring. This print is also accompanied by the original text page.

Henry Constantine Richter 1821 – 1902 was an English zoological illustrator who produced a very large number of skilful coloured lithographs of birds and mammals, mainly for the scientific books of the renowned English 19th century ornithologist John Gould.
Many of the original drawings used by Richter as the basis for his coloured lithographs were by Goulds wife, Elizabeth Coxen, produced before her death in 1841.
Richter\'s reputation was overshadowed by that of his much-celebrated employer. Since it was not customary to acknowledge illustrators alongside authors in the titles of publications, his name was forgotten. But in 1978 his great ability and the extent of his contribution to Goulds work came to light, in the work of the researcher Christine E Jackson.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, green, blue, pink, brown, white
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Plate size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
The Birds of Australia was a book written by John Gould and published in seven volumes between 1840 and 1848. It was the first comprehensive survey of the birds of Australia and included descriptions of 681 species, 328 of which were new to science and were first described by Gould.
Gould and his wife Elizabeth traveled to Australia from England in 1838 to prepare the book. They spent a little under two years collecting specimens for the book. John traveled widely and made extensive collections of Australian birds and other fauna. Elizabeth, who had illustrated several of his earlier works, made hundreds of drawings from specimens for publication in The Birds of Australia
The plates of the book were produced by lithography, Elizabeth produced 84 plates before she died in 1841, Edward Lear produced one, Waterhouse Hawkins contributed one and the remaining 595 plates were produced by H. C. Richter from Elizabeths drawings and were published under his name.
250 sets of the seven-volume work were printed.
In 1865 Gould published a revised and updated version of the text of The Birds of Australia in the two-volume Handbook to the Birds of Australia.

Gould, John FRS 1804 – 1881
Gould was an English ornithologist and bird artist. He published a number of monographs on birds, illustrated by plates that he produced with the assistance of his wife, Elizabeth Gould, and several other artists including Edward Lear, Henry Constantine Richter, Joseph Wolf and William Matthew Hart. He has been considered the father of bird study in Australia and the Gould League in Australia is named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed Darwins finches played a role in the inception of Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection. Goulds work is referenced in Charles Darwins book, On the Origin of Species.
Gould was born in Lyme Regis the first son of a gardener. He and the boy probably had a scanty education. Shortly afterwards his father obtained a position on an estate near Guildford, Surrey, and then in 1818 Gould became foreman in the Royal Gardens of Windsor. He was for some time under the care of J. T. Aiton, of the Royal Gardens of Windsor. The young Gould started training as a gardener, being employed under his father at Windsor from 1818 to 1824, and he was subsequently a gardener at Ripley Castle in Yorkshire. He became an expert in the art of taxidermy. In 1824 he set himself up in business in London as a taxidermist, and his skill helped him to become the first Curator and Preserver at the museum of the Zoological Society of London in 1827.
Goulds position brought him into contact with the countrys leading naturalists. This meant that he was often the first to see new collections of birds given to the Zoological Society of London. In 1830 a collection of birds arrived from the Himalayas, many not previously described. Gould published these birds in A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains (1830–1832). The text was by Nicholas Aylward Vigors and the illustrations were drawn and lithographed by Goulds wife Elizabeth Coxen Gould. Most of Goulds work were rough sketches on paper from which other artists created the lithographic plates.
This work was followed by four more in the next seven years, including Birds of Europe in five volumes. It was completed in 1837; Gould wrote the text, and his clerk, Edwin Prince, did the editing. The plates were drawn and lithographed by Elizabeth Coxen Gould. A few of the illustrations were made by Edward Lear as part of his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae in 1832. Lear, however, was in financial difficulty, and he sold the entire set of lithographs to Gould. The books were published in a very large size, imperial folio, with magnificent coloured plates. Eventually 41 of these volumes were published, with about 3000 plates. They appeared in parts at £3 3s. a number, subscribed for in advance, and in spite of the heavy expense of preparing the plates, Gould succeeded in making his ventures pay, realising a fortune. This was a busy period for Gould who also published Icones Avium in two parts containing 18 leaves of bird studies on 54 cm plates as a supplement to his previous works. No further monographs were published as in 1838 he and his wife moved to Australia to work on the Birds of Australia. Shortly after their return to England, his wife died in 1841. Elizabeth Gould completed 84 plates for Birds of Australia before her death.
When Charles Darwin presented his mammal and bird specimens collected during the second voyage of HMS Beagle to the Zoological Society of London on 4 January 1837, the bird specimens were given to Gould for identification. He set aside his paying work and at the next meeting on 10 January reported that birds from the Galápagos Islands which Darwin had thought were blackbirds, gross-bills and finches were in fact a series of ground Finches which are so peculiar as to form an entirely new group, containing 12 species. This story made the newspapers. In March, Darwin met Gould again, learning that his Galápagos wren was another species of finch and the mockingbirds he had labelled by island were separate species rather than just varieties, with relatives on the South American mainland. Subsequently, Gould advised that the smaller southern Rhea specimen that had been rescued from a Christmas dinner was a separate species which he named Rhea darwinii, whose territory overlapped with the northern rheas. Darwin had not bothered to label his finches by island, but others on the expedition had taken more care. He now sought specimens collected by captain Robert FitzRoy and crewmen. From them he was able to establish that the species were unique to islands, an important step on the inception of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Goulds work on the birds was published between 1838 and 1842 in five numbers as Part 3 of Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, edited by Charles Darwin. Elizabeth Gould illustrated all the plates for Part 3.
In 1838 the Goulds sailed to Australia, intending to study the birds of that country and be the first to produce a major work on the subject. They took with them the collector John Gilbert. They arrived in Tasmania in September, making the acquaintance of the governor Sir John Franklin and his wife. Gould and Gilbert collected on the island. In February 1839 Gould sailed to Sydney, leaving his pregnant wife with the Franklins. He travelled to his brother-in-laws station at Yarrundi, spending his time searching for bowerbirds in the Liverpool Range. In April he returned to Tasmania for the birth of his son. In May he sailed to Adelaide to meet Charles Sturt, who was preparing to lead an expedition to the Murray River. Gould collected in the Mount Lofty range, the Murray Scrubs and Kangaroo Island, returning again to Hobart in July. He then travelled with his wife to Yarrundi. They returned home to England in May 1840.
The result of the trip was The Birds of Australia (1840–48). It included a total of 600 plates in seven volumes; 328 of the species described were new to science and named by Gould. He also published A Monograph of the Macropodidae, or Family of Kangaroos (1841–1842) and the three volume work The Mammals of Australia (1849–1861).
Elizabeth died in 1841 after the birth of their eighth child, Sarah, and Goulds books subsequently used illustrations by a number of artists, including Henry Constantine Richter, William Matthew Hart and Joseph Wolf.
Throughout his professional life Gould had a strong interest in hummingbirds. He accumulated a collection of 320 species, which he exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Despite his interest, Gould had never seen a live hummingbird. In May 1857 he travelled to the United States with his second son, Charles. He arrived in New York too early in the season to see hummingbirds in that city, but on 21 May 1857, in Bartrams Gardens in Philadelphia, he finally saw his first live one, a ruby-throated hummingbird. He then continued to Washington D.C. where he saw large numbers in the gardens of the Capitol. Gould attempted to return to England with live specimens, but, as he was not aware of the conditions necessary to keep them, they only lived for two months at most.
Gould published: A Monograph of the Trochilidae or Humming Birds with 360 plates (1849–61); The Mammals of Australia (1845–63), Handbook to the Birds of Australia (1865), The Birds of Asia (1850–83), The Birds of Great Britain (1862–73) and The Birds of New Guinea and the adjacent Papuan Islands (1875–88).
The University of Glasgow, which owns a copy of Birds of Great Britain, describes John Gould as the greatest figure in bird illustration after Audubon, and auctioneers Sotherans describe the work as Goulds pride and joy.
Gould had already published some of the illustrations in Birds of Europe, but Birds of Great Britain represents a development of his aesthetic style in which he adds illustrations of nests and young on a large scale.
Sotherans Co. reports that Gould published the book himself, producing 750 copies, which remain sought after both as complete volumes, and as individual plates, currently varying in price from £450 – £850. The University of Glasgow records that the volumes were issued in London in 25 parts, to make the complete set, between 1863 and 1873, and each set contained 367 coloured lithographs.
Gould undertook an ornithological tour of Scandinavia in 1856, in preparation for the work, taking with him the artist Henry Wolf who drew 57 of the plates from Goulds preparatory sketches. According to The University of Glasgow Goulds skill was in rapidly producing rough sketches from nature (a majority of the sketches were drawn from newly killed specimens) capturing the distinctiveness of each species. Gould then oversaw the process whereby his artists worked his sketches up into the finished drawings, which were made into coloured lithographs by engraver William Hart.
There were problems: the stone engraving of the snowy owl in volume I was dropped and broken at an early stage in the printing. Later issues of this plate show evidence of this damage and consequently the early issue – printed before the accident – are considered more desirable.
The lithographs were hand coloured. In the introduction for the work, Gould states every sky with its varied tints and every feather of each bird were coloured by hand; and when it is considered that nearly two hundred and eighty thousand illustrations in the present work have been so treated, it will most likely cause some astonishment to those who give the subject a thought.
The work has gathered critical acclaim: according to Mullens and Swann, Birds of Great Britain is the most sumptuous and costly of British bird books, whilst Wood describes it as a magnificent work. Isabella Tree writes that it was seen – perhaps partly because its subject was British, as the culmination of [his] ... genius

• Title : Prion Turtur....J Gould. H C Richter....Hullmandel Imp...
• Size: 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1840-48
• Ref #:  93105

Description:
This beautiful original hand coloured antique lithograph print of the Torres Straits or Crested Tern by John Gould and Henry Constantine Richter, after the drawing of Elizabeth Gould, was published in The Birds of Australia by John Gould between 1840 & 1848.
This, as with all Goulds prints, is of exceptional quality with exquisite hand colouring. This print is also accompanied by the original text page.

Henry Constantine Richter 1821 – 1902 was an English zoological illustrator who produced a very large number of skilful coloured lithographs of birds and mammals, mainly for the scientific books of the renowned English 19th century ornithologist John Gould.
Many of the original drawings used by Richter as the basis for his coloured lithographs were by Goulds wife, Elizabeth Coxen, produced before her death in 1841.
Richters reputation was overshadowed by that of his much-celebrated employer. Since it was not customary to acknowledge illustrators alongside authors in the titles of publications, his name was forgotten. But in 1978 his great ability and the extent of his contribution to Goulds work came to light, in the work of the researcher Christine E Jackson.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, green, blue, pink, brown, white
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Plate size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - Light age toning in margins
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
The Birds of Australia was a book written by John Gould and published in seven volumes between 1840 and 1848. It was the first comprehensive survey of the birds of Australia and included descriptions of 681 species, 328 of which were new to science and were first described by Gould.
Gould and his wife Elizabeth traveled to Australia from England in 1838 to prepare the book. They spent a little under two years collecting specimens for the book. John traveled widely and made extensive collections of Australian birds and other fauna. Elizabeth, who had illustrated several of his earlier works, made hundreds of drawings from specimens for publication in The Birds of Australia
The plates of the book were produced by lithography, Elizabeth produced 84 plates before she died in 1841, Edward Lear produced one, Waterhouse Hawkins contributed one and the remaining 595 plates were produced by H. C. Richter from Elizabeths drawings and were published under his name.
250 sets of the seven-volume work were printed.
In 1865 Gould published a revised and updated version of the text of The Birds of Australia in the two-volume Handbook to the Birds of Australia.

Gould, John FRS 1804 – 1881
Gould was an English ornithologist and bird artist. He published a number of monographs on birds, illustrated by plates that he produced with the assistance of his wife, Elizabeth Gould, and several other artists including Edward Lear, Henry Constantine Richter, Joseph Wolf and William Matthew Hart. He has been considered the father of bird study in Australia and the Gould League in Australia is named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed Darwins finches played a role in the inception of Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection. Goulds work is referenced in Charles Darwins book, On the Origin of Species.
Gould was born in Lyme Regis the first son of a gardener. He and the boy probably had a scanty education. Shortly afterwards his father obtained a position on an estate near Guildford, Surrey, and then in 1818 Gould became foreman in the Royal Gardens of Windsor. He was for some time under the care of J. T. Aiton, of the Royal Gardens of Windsor. The young Gould started training as a gardener, being employed under his father at Windsor from 1818 to 1824, and he was subsequently a gardener at Ripley Castle in Yorkshire. He became an expert in the art of taxidermy. In 1824 he set himself up in business in London as a taxidermist, and his skill helped him to become the first Curator and Preserver at the museum of the Zoological Society of London in 1827.
Goulds position brought him into contact with the countrys leading naturalists. This meant that he was often the first to see new collections of birds given to the Zoological Society of London. In 1830 a collection of birds arrived from the Himalayas, many not previously described. Gould published these birds in A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains (1830–1832). The text was by Nicholas Aylward Vigors and the illustrations were drawn and lithographed by Goulds wife Elizabeth Coxen Gould. Most of Goulds work were rough sketches on paper from which other artists created the lithographic plates.
This work was followed by four more in the next seven years, including Birds of Europe in five volumes. It was completed in 1837; Gould wrote the text, and his clerk, Edwin Prince, did the editing. The plates were drawn and lithographed by Elizabeth Coxen Gould. A few of the illustrations were made by Edward Lear as part of his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae in 1832. Lear, however, was in financial difficulty, and he sold the entire set of lithographs to Gould. The books were published in a very large size, imperial folio, with magnificent coloured plates. Eventually 41 of these volumes were published, with about 3000 plates. They appeared in parts at £3 3s. a number, subscribed for in advance, and in spite of the heavy expense of preparing the plates, Gould succeeded in making his ventures pay, realising a fortune. This was a busy period for Gould who also published Icones Avium in two parts containing 18 leaves of bird studies on 54 cm plates as a supplement to his previous works. No further monographs were published as in 1838 he and his wife moved to Australia to work on the Birds of Australia. Shortly after their return to England, his wife died in 1841. Elizabeth Gould completed 84 plates for Birds of Australia before her death.
When Charles Darwin presented his mammal and bird specimens collected during the second voyage of HMS Beagle to the Zoological Society of London on 4 January 1837, the bird specimens were given to Gould for identification. He set aside his paying work and at the next meeting on 10 January reported that birds from the Galápagos Islands which Darwin had thought were blackbirds, gross-bills and finches were in fact a series of ground Finches which are so peculiar as to form an entirely new group, containing 12 species. This story made the newspapers. In March, Darwin met Gould again, learning that his Galápagos wren was another species of finch and the mockingbirds he had labelled by island were separate species rather than just varieties, with relatives on the South American mainland. Subsequently, Gould advised that the smaller southern Rhea specimen that had been rescued from a Christmas dinner was a separate species which he named Rhea darwinii, whose territory overlapped with the northern rheas. Darwin had not bothered to label his finches by island, but others on the expedition had taken more care. He now sought specimens collected by captain Robert FitzRoy and crewmen. From them he was able to establish that the species were unique to islands, an important step on the inception of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Goulds work on the birds was published between 1838 and 1842 in five numbers as Part 3 of Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, edited by Charles Darwin. Elizabeth Gould illustrated all the plates for Part 3.
In 1838 the Goulds sailed to Australia, intending to study the birds of that country and be the first to produce a major work on the subject. They took with them the collector John Gilbert. They arrived in Tasmania in September, making the acquaintance of the governor Sir John Franklin and his wife. Gould and Gilbert collected on the island. In February 1839 Gould sailed to Sydney, leaving his pregnant wife with the Franklins. He travelled to his brother-in-laws station at Yarrundi, spending his time searching for bowerbirds in the Liverpool Range. In April he returned to Tasmania for the birth of his son. In May he sailed to Adelaide to meet Charles Sturt, who was preparing to lead an expedition to the Murray River. Gould collected in the Mount Lofty range, the Murray Scrubs and Kangaroo Island, returning again to Hobart in July. He then travelled with his wife to Yarrundi. They returned home to England in May 1840.
The result of the trip was The Birds of Australia (1840–48). It included a total of 600 plates in seven volumes; 328 of the species described were new to science and named by Gould. He also published A Monograph of the Macropodidae, or Family of Kangaroos (1841–1842) and the three volume work The Mammals of Australia (1849–1861).
Elizabeth died in 1841 after the birth of their eighth child, Sarah, and Goulds books subsequently used illustrations by a number of artists, including Henry Constantine Richter, William Matthew Hart and Joseph Wolf.
Throughout his professional life Gould had a strong interest in hummingbirds. He accumulated a collection of 320 species, which he exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Despite his interest, Gould had never seen a live hummingbird. In May 1857 he travelled to the United States with his second son, Charles. He arrived in New York too early in the season to see hummingbirds in that city, but on 21 May 1857, in Bartrams Gardens in Philadelphia, he finally saw his first live one, a ruby-throated hummingbird. He then continued to Washington D.C. where he saw large numbers in the gardens of the Capitol. Gould attempted to return to England with live specimens, but, as he was not aware of the conditions necessary to keep them, they only lived for two months at most.
Gould published: A Monograph of the Trochilidae or Humming Birds with 360 plates (1849–61); The Mammals of Australia (1845–63), Handbook to the Birds of Australia (1865), The Birds of Asia (1850–83), The Birds of Great Britain (1862–73) and The Birds of New Guinea and the adjacent Papuan Islands (1875–88).
The University of Glasgow, which owns a copy of Birds of Great Britain, describes John Gould as the greatest figure in bird illustration after Audubon, and auctioneers Sotherans describe the work as Goulds pride and joy.
Gould had already published some of the illustrations in Birds of Europe, but Birds of Great Britain represents a development of his aesthetic style in which he adds illustrations of nests and young on a large scale.
Sotherans Co. reports that Gould published the book himself, producing 750 copies, which remain sought after both as complete volumes, and as individual plates, currently varying in price from £450 – £850. The University of Glasgow records that the volumes were issued in London in 25 parts, to make the complete set, between 1863 and 1873, and each set contained 367 coloured lithographs.
Gould undertook an ornithological tour of Scandinavia in 1856, in preparation for the work, taking with him the artist Henry Wolf who drew 57 of the plates from Goulds preparatory sketches. According to The University of Glasgow Goulds skill was in rapidly producing rough sketches from nature (a majority of the sketches were drawn from newly killed specimens) capturing the distinctiveness of each species. Gould then oversaw the process whereby his artists worked his sketches up into the finished drawings, which were made into coloured lithographs by engraver William Hart.
There were problems: the stone engraving of the snowy owl in volume I was dropped and broken at an early stage in the printing. Later issues of this plate show evidence of this damage and consequently the early issue – printed before the accident – are considered more desirable.
The lithographs were hand coloured. In the introduction for the work, Gould states every sky with its varied tints and every feather of each bird were coloured by hand; and when it is considered that nearly two hundred and eighty thousand illustrations in the present work have been so treated, it will most likely cause some astonishment to those who give the subject a thought.
The work has gathered critical acclaim: according to Mullens and Swann, Birds of Great Britain is the most sumptuous and costly of British bird books, whilst Wood describes it as a magnificent work. Isabella Tree writes that it was seen – perhaps partly because its subject was British, as the culmination of [his] ... genius

• Title : Procellaria Coerulea: G Mel....J Gould. H C Richter....Hullmandel & Walton Imp...
• Size: 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1840-48
• Ref #:  93104

Description:
This beautiful original hand coloured antique lithograph print of the Blue Petrel by John Gould and Henry Constantine Richter, after the drawing of Elizabeth Gould, was published in The Birds of Australia by John Gould between 1840 & 1848.
This, as with all Goulds prints, is of exceptional quality with exquisite hand colouring. This print is also accompanied by the original text page.

Henry Constantine Richter 1821 – 1902 was an English zoological illustrator who produced a very large number of skilful coloured lithographs of birds and mammals, mainly for the scientific books of the renowned English 19th century ornithologist John Gould.
Many of the original drawings used by Richter as the basis for his coloured lithographs were by Goulds wife, Elizabeth Coxen, produced before her death in 1841.
Richter\'s reputation was overshadowed by that of his much-celebrated employer. Since it was not customary to acknowledge illustrators alongside authors in the titles of publications, his name was forgotten. But in 1978 his great ability and the extent of his contribution to Goulds work came to light, in the work of the researcher Christine E Jackson.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, green, blue, pink, brown, white
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Plate size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
The Birds of Australia was a book written by John Gould and published in seven volumes between 1840 and 1848. It was the first comprehensive survey of the birds of Australia and included descriptions of 681 species, 328 of which were new to science and were first described by Gould.
Gould and his wife Elizabeth traveled to Australia from England in 1838 to prepare the book. They spent a little under two years collecting specimens for the book. John traveled widely and made extensive collections of Australian birds and other fauna. Elizabeth, who had illustrated several of his earlier works, made hundreds of drawings from specimens for publication in The Birds of Australia
The plates of the book were produced by lithography, Elizabeth produced 84 plates before she died in 1841, Edward Lear produced one, Waterhouse Hawkins contributed one and the remaining 595 plates were produced by H. C. Richter from Elizabeths drawings and were published under his name.
250 sets of the seven-volume work were printed.
In 1865 Gould published a revised and updated version of the text of The Birds of Australia in the two-volume Handbook to the Birds of Australia.

Gould, John FRS 1804 – 1881
Gould was an English ornithologist and bird artist. He published a number of monographs on birds, illustrated by plates that he produced with the assistance of his wife, Elizabeth Gould, and several other artists including Edward Lear, Henry Constantine Richter, Joseph Wolf and William Matthew Hart. He has been considered the father of bird study in Australia and the Gould League in Australia is named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed Darwins finches played a role in the inception of Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection. Goulds work is referenced in Charles Darwins book, On the Origin of Species.
Gould was born in Lyme Regis the first son of a gardener. He and the boy probably had a scanty education. Shortly afterwards his father obtained a position on an estate near Guildford, Surrey, and then in 1818 Gould became foreman in the Royal Gardens of Windsor. He was for some time under the care of J. T. Aiton, of the Royal Gardens of Windsor. The young Gould started training as a gardener, being employed under his father at Windsor from 1818 to 1824, and he was subsequently a gardener at Ripley Castle in Yorkshire. He became an expert in the art of taxidermy. In 1824 he set himself up in business in London as a taxidermist, and his skill helped him to become the first Curator and Preserver at the museum of the Zoological Society of London in 1827.
Goulds position brought him into contact with the countrys leading naturalists. This meant that he was often the first to see new collections of birds given to the Zoological Society of London. In 1830 a collection of birds arrived from the Himalayas, many not previously described. Gould published these birds in A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains (1830–1832). The text was by Nicholas Aylward Vigors and the illustrations were drawn and lithographed by Goulds wife Elizabeth Coxen Gould. Most of Goulds work were rough sketches on paper from which other artists created the lithographic plates.
This work was followed by four more in the next seven years, including Birds of Europe in five volumes. It was completed in 1837; Gould wrote the text, and his clerk, Edwin Prince, did the editing. The plates were drawn and lithographed by Elizabeth Coxen Gould. A few of the illustrations were made by Edward Lear as part of his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae in 1832. Lear, however, was in financial difficulty, and he sold the entire set of lithographs to Gould. The books were published in a very large size, imperial folio, with magnificent coloured plates. Eventually 41 of these volumes were published, with about 3000 plates. They appeared in parts at £3 3s. a number, subscribed for in advance, and in spite of the heavy expense of preparing the plates, Gould succeeded in making his ventures pay, realising a fortune. This was a busy period for Gould who also published Icones Avium in two parts containing 18 leaves of bird studies on 54 cm plates as a supplement to his previous works. No further monographs were published as in 1838 he and his wife moved to Australia to work on the Birds of Australia. Shortly after their return to England, his wife died in 1841. Elizabeth Gould completed 84 plates for Birds of Australia before her death.
When Charles Darwin presented his mammal and bird specimens collected during the second voyage of HMS Beagle to the Zoological Society of London on 4 January 1837, the bird specimens were given to Gould for identification. He set aside his paying work and at the next meeting on 10 January reported that birds from the Galápagos Islands which Darwin had thought were blackbirds, gross-bills and finches were in fact a series of ground Finches which are so peculiar as to form an entirely new group, containing 12 species. This story made the newspapers. In March, Darwin met Gould again, learning that his Galápagos wren was another species of finch and the mockingbirds he had labelled by island were separate species rather than just varieties, with relatives on the South American mainland. Subsequently, Gould advised that the smaller southern Rhea specimen that had been rescued from a Christmas dinner was a separate species which he named Rhea darwinii, whose territory overlapped with the northern rheas. Darwin had not bothered to label his finches by island, but others on the expedition had taken more care. He now sought specimens collected by captain Robert FitzRoy and crewmen. From them he was able to establish that the species were unique to islands, an important step on the inception of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Goulds work on the birds was published between 1838 and 1842 in five numbers as Part 3 of Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, edited by Charles Darwin. Elizabeth Gould illustrated all the plates for Part 3.
In 1838 the Goulds sailed to Australia, intending to study the birds of that country and be the first to produce a major work on the subject. They took with them the collector John Gilbert. They arrived in Tasmania in September, making the acquaintance of the governor Sir John Franklin and his wife. Gould and Gilbert collected on the island. In February 1839 Gould sailed to Sydney, leaving his pregnant wife with the Franklins. He travelled to his brother-in-laws station at Yarrundi, spending his time searching for bowerbirds in the Liverpool Range. In April he returned to Tasmania for the birth of his son. In May he sailed to Adelaide to meet Charles Sturt, who was preparing to lead an expedition to the Murray River. Gould collected in the Mount Lofty range, the Murray Scrubs and Kangaroo Island, returning again to Hobart in July. He then travelled with his wife to Yarrundi. They returned home to England in May 1840.
The result of the trip was The Birds of Australia (1840–48). It included a total of 600 plates in seven volumes; 328 of the species described were new to science and named by Gould. He also published A Monograph of the Macropodidae, or Family of Kangaroos (1841–1842) and the three volume work The Mammals of Australia (1849–1861).
Elizabeth died in 1841 after the birth of their eighth child, Sarah, and Goulds books subsequently used illustrations by a number of artists, including Henry Constantine Richter, William Matthew Hart and Joseph Wolf.
Throughout his professional life Gould had a strong interest in hummingbirds. He accumulated a collection of 320 species, which he exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Despite his interest, Gould had never seen a live hummingbird. In May 1857 he travelled to the United States with his second son, Charles. He arrived in New York too early in the season to see hummingbirds in that city, but on 21 May 1857, in Bartrams Gardens in Philadelphia, he finally saw his first live one, a ruby-throated hummingbird. He then continued to Washington D.C. where he saw large numbers in the gardens of the Capitol. Gould attempted to return to England with live specimens, but, as he was not aware of the conditions necessary to keep them, they only lived for two months at most.
Gould published: A Monograph of the Trochilidae or Humming Birds with 360 plates (1849–61); The Mammals of Australia (1845–63), Handbook to the Birds of Australia (1865), The Birds of Asia (1850–83), The Birds of Great Britain (1862–73) and The Birds of New Guinea and the adjacent Papuan Islands (1875–88).
The University of Glasgow, which owns a copy of Birds of Great Britain, describes John Gould as the greatest figure in bird illustration after Audubon, and auctioneers Sotherans describe the work as Goulds pride and joy.
Gould had already published some of the illustrations in Birds of Europe, but Birds of Great Britain represents a development of his aesthetic style in which he adds illustrations of nests and young on a large scale.
Sotherans Co. reports that Gould published the book himself, producing 750 copies, which remain sought after both as complete volumes, and as individual plates, currently varying in price from £450 – £850. The University of Glasgow records that the volumes were issued in London in 25 parts, to make the complete set, between 1863 and 1873, and each set contained 367 coloured lithographs.
Gould undertook an ornithological tour of Scandinavia in 1856, in preparation for the work, taking with him the artist Henry Wolf who drew 57 of the plates from Goulds preparatory sketches. According to The University of Glasgow Goulds skill was in rapidly producing rough sketches from nature (a majority of the sketches were drawn from newly killed specimens) capturing the distinctiveness of each species. Gould then oversaw the process whereby his artists worked his sketches up into the finished drawings, which were made into coloured lithographs by engraver William Hart.
There were problems: the stone engraving of the snowy owl in volume I was dropped and broken at an early stage in the printing. Later issues of this plate show evidence of this damage and consequently the early issue – printed before the accident – are considered more desirable.
The lithographs were hand coloured. In the introduction for the work, Gould states every sky with its varied tints and every feather of each bird were coloured by hand; and when it is considered that nearly two hundred and eighty thousand illustrations in the present work have been so treated, it will most likely cause some astonishment to those who give the subject a thought.
The work has gathered critical acclaim: according to Mullens and Swann, Birds of Great Britain is the most sumptuous and costly of British bird books, whilst Wood describes it as a magnificent work. Isabella Tree writes that it was seen – perhaps partly because its subject was British, as the culmination of [his] ... genius

• Title : Onychoprion Panaya....J Gould. H C Richter....Hullmandel & Walton Imp...
• Size: 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1840-48
• Ref #:  93102

Description:
This beautiful original hand coloured antique lithograph print, of the Panayan Tern, or Bridled Tern, by John Gould and Henry Constantine Richter, after the drawing of Elizabeth Gould, was published in The Birds of Australia by John Gould between 1840 & 1848.
This, as with all Goulds prints, is of exceptional quality with exquisite hand colouring. This print is also accompanied by the original text page.

Henry Constantine Richter 1821 – 1902 was an English zoological illustrator who produced a very large number of skilful coloured lithographs of birds and mammals, mainly for the scientific books of the renowned English 19th century ornithologist John Gould.
Many of the original drawings used by Richter as the basis for his coloured lithographs were by Goulds wife, Elizabeth Coxen, produced before her death in 1841.
Richter\'s reputation was overshadowed by that of his much-celebrated employer. Since it was not customary to acknowledge illustrators alongside authors in the titles of publications, his name was forgotten. But in 1978 his great ability and the extent of his contribution to Goulds work came to light, in the work of the researcher Christine E Jackson.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, green, blue, pink, brown, white
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Plate size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Margins: - Min 1in (25mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
The Birds of Australia was a book written by John Gould and published in seven volumes between 1840 and 1848. It was the first comprehensive survey of the birds of Australia and included descriptions of 681 species, 328 of which were new to science and were first described by Gould.
Gould and his wife Elizabeth traveled to Australia from England in 1838 to prepare the book. They spent a little under two years collecting specimens for the book. John traveled widely and made extensive collections of Australian birds and other fauna. Elizabeth, who had illustrated several of his earlier works, made hundreds of drawings from specimens for publication in The Birds of Australia
The plates of the book were produced by lithography, Elizabeth produced 84 plates before she died in 1841, Edward Lear produced one, Waterhouse Hawkins contributed one and the remaining 595 plates were produced by H. C. Richter from Elizabeths drawings and were published under his name.
250 sets of the seven-volume work were printed.
In 1865 Gould published a revised and updated version of the text of The Birds of Australia in the two-volume Handbook to the Birds of Australia.

Gould, John FRS 1804 – 1881
Gould was an English ornithologist and bird artist. He published a number of monographs on birds, illustrated by plates that he produced with the assistance of his wife, Elizabeth Gould, and several other artists including Edward Lear, Henry Constantine Richter, Joseph Wolf and William Matthew Hart. He has been considered the father of bird study in Australia and the Gould League in Australia is named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed Darwins finches played a role in the inception of Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection. Goulds work is referenced in Charles Darwins book, On the Origin of Species.
Gould was born in Lyme Regis the first son of a gardener. He and the boy probably had a scanty education. Shortly afterwards his father obtained a position on an estate near Guildford, Surrey, and then in 1818 Gould became foreman in the Royal Gardens of Windsor. He was for some time under the care of J. T. Aiton, of the Royal Gardens of Windsor. The young Gould started training as a gardener, being employed under his father at Windsor from 1818 to 1824, and he was subsequently a gardener at Ripley Castle in Yorkshire. He became an expert in the art of taxidermy. In 1824 he set himself up in business in London as a taxidermist, and his skill helped him to become the first Curator and Preserver at the museum of the Zoological Society of London in 1827.
Goulds position brought him into contact with the countrys leading naturalists. This meant that he was often the first to see new collections of birds given to the Zoological Society of London. In 1830 a collection of birds arrived from the Himalayas, many not previously described. Gould published these birds in A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains (1830–1832). The text was by Nicholas Aylward Vigors and the illustrations were drawn and lithographed by Goulds wife Elizabeth Coxen Gould. Most of Goulds work were rough sketches on paper from which other artists created the lithographic plates.
This work was followed by four more in the next seven years, including Birds of Europe in five volumes. It was completed in 1837; Gould wrote the text, and his clerk, Edwin Prince, did the editing. The plates were drawn and lithographed by Elizabeth Coxen Gould. A few of the illustrations were made by Edward Lear as part of his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae in 1832. Lear, however, was in financial difficulty, and he sold the entire set of lithographs to Gould. The books were published in a very large size, imperial folio, with magnificent coloured plates. Eventually 41 of these volumes were published, with about 3000 plates. They appeared in parts at £3 3s. a number, subscribed for in advance, and in spite of the heavy expense of preparing the plates, Gould succeeded in making his ventures pay, realising a fortune. This was a busy period for Gould who also published Icones Avium in two parts containing 18 leaves of bird studies on 54 cm plates as a supplement to his previous works. No further monographs were published as in 1838 he and his wife moved to Australia to work on the Birds of Australia. Shortly after their return to England, his wife died in 1841. Elizabeth Gould completed 84 plates for Birds of Australia before her death.
When Charles Darwin presented his mammal and bird specimens collected during the second voyage of HMS Beagle to the Zoological Society of London on 4 January 1837, the bird specimens were given to Gould for identification. He set aside his paying work and at the next meeting on 10 January reported that birds from the Galápagos Islands which Darwin had thought were blackbirds, gross-bills and finches were in fact a series of ground Finches which are so peculiar as to form an entirely new group, containing 12 species. This story made the newspapers. In March, Darwin met Gould again, learning that his Galápagos wren was another species of finch and the mockingbirds he had labelled by island were separate species rather than just varieties, with relatives on the South American mainland. Subsequently, Gould advised that the smaller southern Rhea specimen that had been rescued from a Christmas dinner was a separate species which he named Rhea darwinii, whose territory overlapped with the northern rheas. Darwin had not bothered to label his finches by island, but others on the expedition had taken more care. He now sought specimens collected by captain Robert FitzRoy and crewmen. From them he was able to establish that the species were unique to islands, an important step on the inception of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Goulds work on the birds was published between 1838 and 1842 in five numbers as Part 3 of Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, edited by Charles Darwin. Elizabeth Gould illustrated all the plates for Part 3.
In 1838 the Goulds sailed to Australia, intending to study the birds of that country and be the first to produce a major work on the subject. They took with them the collector John Gilbert. They arrived in Tasmania in September, making the acquaintance of the governor Sir John Franklin and his wife. Gould and Gilbert collected on the island. In February 1839 Gould sailed to Sydney, leaving his pregnant wife with the Franklins. He travelled to his brother-in-laws station at Yarrundi, spending his time searching for bowerbirds in the Liverpool Range. In April he returned to Tasmania for the birth of his son. In May he sailed to Adelaide to meet Charles Sturt, who was preparing to lead an expedition to the Murray River. Gould collected in the Mount Lofty range, the Murray Scrubs and Kangaroo Island, returning again to Hobart in July. He then travelled with his wife to Yarrundi. They returned home to England in May 1840.
The result of the trip was The Birds of Australia (1840–48). It included a total of 600 plates in seven volumes; 328 of the species described were new to science and named by Gould. He also published A Monograph of the Macropodidae, or Family of Kangaroos (1841–1842) and the three volume work The Mammals of Australia (1849–1861).
Elizabeth died in 1841 after the birth of their eighth child, Sarah, and Goulds books subsequently used illustrations by a number of artists, including Henry Constantine Richter, William Matthew Hart and Joseph Wolf.
Throughout his professional life Gould had a strong interest in hummingbirds. He accumulated a collection of 320 species, which he exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Despite his interest, Gould had never seen a live hummingbird. In May 1857 he travelled to the United States with his second son, Charles. He arrived in New York too early in the season to see hummingbirds in that city, but on 21 May 1857, in Bartrams Gardens in Philadelphia, he finally saw his first live one, a ruby-throated hummingbird. He then continued to Washington D.C. where he saw large numbers in the gardens of the Capitol. Gould attempted to return to England with live specimens, but, as he was not aware of the conditions necessary to keep them, they only lived for two months at most.
Gould published: A Monograph of the Trochilidae or Humming Birds with 360 plates (1849–61); The Mammals of Australia (1845–63), Handbook to the Birds of Australia (1865), The Birds of Asia (1850–83), The Birds of Great Britain (1862–73) and The Birds of New Guinea and the adjacent Papuan Islands (1875–88).
The University of Glasgow, which owns a copy of Birds of Great Britain, describes John Gould as the greatest figure in bird illustration after Audubon, and auctioneers Sotherans describe the work as Goulds pride and joy.
Gould had already published some of the illustrations in Birds of Europe, but Birds of Great Britain represents a development of his aesthetic style in which he adds illustrations of nests and young on a large scale.
Sotherans Co. reports that Gould published the book himself, producing 750 copies, which remain sought after both as complete volumes, and as individual plates, currently varying in price from £450 – £850. The University of Glasgow records that the volumes were issued in London in 25 parts, to make the complete set, between 1863 and 1873, and each set contained 367 coloured lithographs.
Gould undertook an ornithological tour of Scandinavia in 1856, in preparation for the work, taking with him the artist Henry Wolf who drew 57 of the plates from Goulds preparatory sketches. According to The University of Glasgow Goulds skill was in rapidly producing rough sketches from nature (a majority of the sketches were drawn from newly killed specimens) capturing the distinctiveness of each species. Gould then oversaw the process whereby his artists worked his sketches up into the finished drawings, which were made into coloured lithographs by engraver William Hart.
There were problems: the stone engraving of the snowy owl in volume I was dropped and broken at an early stage in the printing. Later issues of this plate show evidence of this damage and consequently the early issue – printed before the accident – are considered more desirable.
The lithographs were hand coloured. In the introduction for the work, Gould states every sky with its varied tints and every feather of each bird were coloured by hand; and when it is considered that nearly two hundred and eighty thousand illustrations in the present work have been so treated, it will most likely cause some astonishment to those who give the subject a thought.
The work has gathered critical acclaim: according to Mullens and Swann, Birds of Great Britain is the most sumptuous and costly of British bird books, whilst Wood describes it as a magnificent work. Isabella Tree writes that it was seen – perhaps partly because its subject was British, as the culmination of [his] ... genius

• Title : Podoces Humilis, Hume...J Gould & W Hart del et Lith....Walter Imp.
• Size: 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Date : 1850
• Ref #:  23189

Description:
This finely engraved superbly hand coloured original antique bird print of Podoces Humilis or the Tibetan ground-tit or Humes ground-tit, was published by John Gould in the 1850 release of his illustrated ornithology book The Birds of Asia. Lithography by J Gould, HC Richter & W. Hart publication by Hullamdel, Walton & Walter

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, green, blue, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Plate size: - 21 1/2in x 14 1/2in (490mm x 370mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - Very light age toning in margins
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background: 
One of the great bird artists of all time, John Gould created over 3,000 plates of birds in over 40 volumes.
Around 1830, while working as taxidermist for the Zoological Society of London, he received a shipment of exotic bird skins from the Himalayas. Soon after, he published A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Moutains.
The success of this work, along with the Birds of Europe (1832-37) and a Monograph of the Ramphastidae [Toucans] allowed him to travel to Australia and New Guinea. Among Gould\'s better known works are the Birds of Australia (1849-69), the Birds of Asia (1850-83), and Birds of Great Britain (1862-73).
Though Gould himself sketched most of his plates, other artists such as his wife Elizabeth, Edward Lear, Joseph Wolf, William Hart and Henry C. Richter finished them. Gould\'s plates are highly esteemed for their composition, accurate detail, and coloring. (Ref: Methuen)

• Title : CCIV
• Date : 1856
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Ref:  90418
• Size: 9 3/4in x 6 1/4in (250mm x 160mm) 

Description: 

This fine original, antique hand coloured engraved print, the Eggs of Morris Birds - (top) Black-Throated Diver (below) Red Throated Diver ; Plate CCIV from Volume III, was published in the 1856 edition of Francis Morris 'A Natural History of the Nest and Eggs of British Birds'

A History of British Birds - The inspiration for Francis Orpen Morris' A History of British Birds actually came from the renowned English printer, Benjamion Fawcett, who approached Morris to write the text when Morris became Vicar of Nafferton. Morris had a reputation as a popular writer on natural history in general and birds in particular. His first book had appeared as early as 1834, a guide to an arrangement of British birds. However, his association with Benjamin Fawcett was to have remarkable results, particularly for the study of ornithology.

History of British Birds was entirely printed and bound in the small North Country village of Driffield, Fawcett’s residence and shop, and shipped in tea chests to London. It was a resounding success.

Work on A History of British Birds probably began in 1848. Publication, which took over seven years to complete from June 1850, was undertaken in monthly parts costing one shilling. Each part contained 24 pages of letterpress and 4 hand-coloured plates. The final six volume work contained 358 coloured plates. One thousand copies of the first part were initially produced, but such was the demand that Fawcett quickly had to move into larger premises.

Alexander Francis Lydon was one of Fawcett’s principal engravers, contributing much in technique and design A team of women colourists under very strict scrutiny first from Fawcett then his wife (a former colourist herself) hand coloured each plate. Morris became an early advocate for conservation and was instrumental in founding the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

General Description: Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy & stable
Paper color: - White
Age of map color: -  Original
Colors used: - Yellow, brown,  
General color appearance: - Authentic 
Paper size: - 9 3/4in x 6 1/4in (250mm x 160mm)
Plate size: - 9 3/4in x 6 1/4in (250mm x 160mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None 

• Title : CCII
• Date : 1856
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition
• Ref:  90418
• Size: 9 3/4in x 6 1/4in (250mm x 160mm) 

Description: 
This fine original, antique hand coloured engraved print, the Eggs of Great Northern Diver or Loon; Plate CCIII from Volume III, was published in the 1856 edition of Francis Morris 'A Natural History of the Nest and Eggs of British Birds'

A History of British Birds - The inspiration for Francis Orpen Morris' A History of British Birds actually came from the renowned English printer, Benjamion Fawcett, who approached Morris to write the text when Morris became Vicar of Nafferton. Morris had a reputation as a popular writer on natural history in general and birds in particular. His first book had appeared as early as 1834, a guide to an arrangement of British birds. However, his association with Benjamin Fawcett was to have remarkable results, particularly for the study of ornithology.

History of British Birds was entirely printed and bound in the small North Country village of Driffield, Fawcett’s residence and shop, and shipped in tea chests to London. It was a resounding success.

Work on A History of British Birds probably began in 1848. Publication, which took over seven years to complete from June 1850, was undertaken in monthly parts costing one shilling. Each part contained 24 pages of letterpress and 4 hand-coloured plates. The final six volume work contained 358 coloured plates. One thousand copies of the first part were initially produced, but such was the demand that Fawcett quickly had to move into larger premises.

Alexander Francis Lydon was one of Fawcett’s principal engravers, contributing much in technique and design A team of women colourists under very strict scrutiny first from Fawcett then his wife (a former colourist herself) hand coloured each plate. Morris became an early advocate for conservation and was instrumental in founding the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

General Description: Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy & stable
Paper color: - White
Age of map color: -  Original
Colors used: - Yellow, brown,  
General color appearance: - Authentic 
Paper size: - 9 3/4in x 6 1/4in (250mm x 160mm)
Plate size: - 9 3/4in x 6 1/4in (250mm x 160mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - None
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None 

• Title : Pinicola Enucleator
• Ref #:  23486
• Size: 21 1/2in x 14in (545mm x 360mm)
• Date : 1862
• Condition: (A+) Fine Condition

Description:
This large original hand coloured antique lithograph of the male & female Pine Grosbeak or Pinicola Enucleator, found from Siberia to the United States, was published in the 1862-73 edition of John Goulds The Birds of Great Britain. Lithography by J Gould, HC Richter & Walter.

The University of Glasgow, which owns a copy of Birds of Great Britain, describes John Gould as the greatest figure in bird illustration after Audubon. Gould was not directly responsible for the illustrations himself, although he supervised their production closely. Auctioneers Sotherans describe the work as Goulds pride and joy.
Gould had already published some of the illustrations in Birds of Europe, but Birds of Great Britain represents a development of an aesthetic style in which illustrations of nests and young are added on a large scale.
Sotherans Co. reports that Gould published the book himself, producing 750 copies, which remain sought after both as complete volumes, and as individual plates, currently varying in price from £450 – £850. The University of Glasgow records that the volumes were issued in London in 25 parts, to make the complete set, between 1863 and 1873, and each set contained 367 coloured lithographs.
Gould undertook an ornithological tour of Scandinavia in 1856, in preparation for the work, taking with him the artist Henry Wolf who drew 57 of the plates from Goulds preparatory sketches. According to The University of Glasgow Goulds skill was in rapidly producing rough sketches from nature (a majority of the sketches were drawn from newly killed specimens) capturing the distinctiveness of each species. Gould then oversaw the process whereby his artists worked his sketches up into the finished drawings, which were made into coloured lithographs by engraver William Hart.
There were problems: the stone engraving of the snowy owl in volume I was dropped and broken at an early stage in the printing. Later issues of this plate show evidence of this damage and consequently the early issue – printed before the accident – are considered more desirable.
The lithographs were hand coloured. In the introduction for the work, Gould states every sky with its varied tints and every feather of each bird were coloured by hand; and when it is considered that nearly two hundred and eighty thousand illustrations in the present work have been so treated, it will most likely cause some astonishment to those who give the subject a thought.
The work has gathered critical acclaim: according to Mullens and Swann, Birds of Great Britain is the most sumptuous and costly of British bird books, whilst Wood describes it as a magnificent work. Isabella Tree writes that it was seen – perhaps partly because its subject was British, as the culmination of [his] ... genius.

General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: - Original
Colors used: - Yellow, green, blue, pink
General color appearance: - Authentic
Paper size: - 21 1/2in x 14in (545mm x 360mm)
Plate size: - 21 1/2in x 14in (545mm x 360mm)
Margins: - Min 1/2in (12mm)

Imperfections:
Margins: - Light matt line to border
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None

Background:
One of the great bird artists of all time, John Gould created over 3,000 plates of birds in over 40 volumes.
Around 1830, while working as taxidermist for the Zoological Society of London, he received a shipment of exotic bird skins from the Himalayas. Soon after, he published A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains.
The success of this work, along with the Birds of Europe (1832-37) and a Monograph of the Ramphastidae [Toucans] allowed him to travel to Australia and New Guinea. Among Gould's better known works are the Birds of Australia (1849-69), the Birds of Asia (1850-83), and Birds of Great Britain (1862-73).
Though Gould himself sketched most of his plates, other artists such as his wife Elizabeth, Edward Lear, Joseph Wolf, William Hart and Henry C. Richter finished them. Gould's plates are highly esteemed for their composition, accurate detail, and coloring. (Ref: Methuen)

Please note all items auctioned are genuine, we do not sell reproductions. A Certificate of Authenticity (COA) can be issued on request.