That copy, which had a short tear to one plate and was bound in contemporary half brown morocco gilt, was one of half a dozen natural history colour plate collections offered as part of a special Fine Arts sale conducted last month by Lawrences of Crewkerne, and it brought a bid of £64,000.
Last November, at Christie’s, another copy of this most sumptuous of Elliot’s great monographs, bound in contemporary green half morocco, was bid up to £72,000, but at that same King Street sale a copy of Elliot’s Monograph of the Felidae, or Family of the Cats, a first edition set bound up (in later half crushed green morocco) from the original parts of 1878-83 and preserving the upper parts of the wrappers, was left unsold on a strong estimate of £50,000-60,000.
A copy offered in this Crewkerne sale, in a contemporary half morocco binding that showed some staining – even some nibbling – was estimated at a more modest £25,000-35,000 and found a buyer at £34,000. In this work, it was Wolf who prepared the 43 coloured litho plates – one of which is reproduced above here – from the original drawings of Joseph Smit.
The other bird books offered by Lawrences were a five-vol. Gould Birds of Great Britain of 1862-73, containing 367 coloured litho plates and bound in contemporary half green morocco, which sold at £34,000; Richard Bowdler Sharpe’s ...Birds of Paradise and ...Bower Birds, published in parts by Sotherans in 1891-98 and here bound as two volumes in half green morocco gilt to preserve the front wrappers and the 79 coloured litho plates, which made £15,000; and Lord Lilford’s Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Isles, a seven-vol. second edition of 1885-97 containing 421 chromo or hand-coloured litho plates after Thorburn, Keulemans and others, which reached £900, despite some dampstaining to the bindings and upper margins of the plates in Vols. VI & VII. One plate in Vol.II of Lilford’s work, depicting a sand martin, was catalogued as being an original watercolour.
A Curtis Flora Londinensis..., the two volumes of 1775-98 in defective bindings but the 435 hand coloured engraved plates still clean, sold for £5800.
Lawrences, Crewkerne,
February 15
Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent
Smit and Wolf switch roles when dealing with big cats
UK: ILLUSTRATED on the front page of last week’s Antiques Trade Gazette was one of of 79 coloured litho plates by Smit and Keulemans after the original charcoal drawings by Joseph Wolf, the brilliant ornithological artist to whose “unrivalled talent” Daniel Giraud Eliot dedicated his two volume Monograph of the Phasianidae, or Family of the Pheasants of 1870-72.
