First edition. 2 vols. 79 fine hand-coloured lithographic plates & 13 uncoloured illustrations. Large folio. Contemporary green half morocco, spines elaborately gilt, extremities rubbed, but very good indeed. London, Taylor & Francis for Henry Sotheran & Co, 1891 -, 1898.
A handsome copy of one of the greatest bird books. This is essentially a continuation of John Gould's Birds of New Guinea (1875-1888), which both Richard Bowdler Sharpe (1847-1909) and the Irish artist William Matthew Hart (1830-1908) completed after Gould's death in 1881.
Sharpe, who worked at the British Museum, made his name as an ornithologist with the publication of his Monograph of the Kingfishers (1868-1871), which was illustrated by his long term collaborator, John Gerrard Keulemans (1842-1912). Given charge of the museum's bird collections, Sharpe was a colleague of, and a collaborator with, Gould and was instrumental in the publication of his posthumous works. "Sharpe completed Gould's The Birds of Asia, The Birds of New Guinea, and a supplement to A Monograph of the Trochilidae [and] in 1893 published An Analytical Index to the Works of the Late John Gould, adding a biography which has remained the main source of information about Gould's life and work" (ODNB).
A note in the appendix puts this publication in context: "Gould, in his Birds of New Guinea, figured nearly every species known in his day, and he had intended to publish a complete Monograph of the Family, for which purpose he kept the lithographic stones from which the plates had been prepared. Thus it came to pass that when Messrs. Sotheran purchased the stock of Gould's works after his death, they acquired the stones with which he had intended to illustrate his Monograph of the Paradiseidae. Many of them were broken or otherwise damaged, and of these some have been redrawn or replaced by new plates by Mr. Hart. Since Gould's time, however, many marvellous new species have been discovered, and these have been described and figured in the present work."
The seventy-nine plates are mostly by William Hart, who had worked previously on Gould's book on hummingbirds and had collaborated with Henry Constantine Richter on Gould's The Birds of Great Britain (1863-1873). By 1870, he was Gould's primary artist and lithographer. He was employed by Sharpe after Gould's death.
Published for three guineas a part, the original plan was for the complete work to consist of six parts, but because new species were discovered during the course of publication two more parts were added, this is explained to purchasers in a quarto slip tipped in at the front of part 6. About 20 plates have been taken from Gould's Birds of New Guinea while the remainder, those from foreign collections, are by John Keulemans.
Throughout the early years of the twentieth century, some copies were compiled from uncoloured plates and then coloured and bound. As such, only those copies which have remained in original parts, together with those with a certain provenance dating back to the time of issue that can be securely identified as examples with "proper" colour (although in truth copies with later colour are immediately distinguishable by the colourist's lack of expertise and attention to detail). The original version has spectacular colour and each image is lustrously rendered as in this example.
Fine Bird Books (1990) p.107; Nissen IVB 581; Ripley 263; Wood, p.565; Zimmer, p.581.
