Charles Lucien Bonaparte | Iconographie des Pigeons non figures par Mme Knip, Paris, 1857

Charles Lucien Bonaparte

Iconographie des pigeons non figures par Mme Knip. Paris: P. Bertrand, 1857

FIRST EDITION, folio (550 x 355mm.), half-title, 55 hand-coloured lithographed plates by and after Paul Louis Oudart, F. Willy, and E. Blanchard, printed by Lemercier, red half morocco by Sangorski and Sutcliffe, original buff wrappers for the second livraison bound in at end, some slight spotting and foxing as normal

This work was intended to supplement Madame Knip's Les Pigeons, but stands independently on its own merits. Largely a posthumous treatise, it was edited by A. Moquin-Tandon, a distinguished ornithologist as well as a botanist and member of the Institut Went in Paris. Prince Bonaparte had planned the work to be issued in 30 livraisons of 150 plates, but died after the publication of the fourth livraison, leaving the manuscript and plates incomplete. Consequently, the plates are irregularly numbered.

"The hand-colored bird portraits are extremely fine" (McGill/Wood).

LITERATURE:

Fine Bird Books, p. 60; McGill/Wood, p. 248; Nissen IVB 117; Zimmer, p. 78