Item #JLR0862 Iconographie des pigeons non figurés par Mme Knip (Mme Pauline Decourcelles) dans les deux volumes de MM. Temminck et Florent Prévost. Charles-Lucien Bonaparte.
Iconographie des pigeons non figurés par Mme Knip (Mme Pauline Decourcelles) dans les deux volumes de MM. Temminck et Florent Prévost
Iconographie des pigeons non figurés par Mme Knip (Mme Pauline Decourcelles) dans les deux volumes de MM. Temminck et Florent Prévost
Iconographie des pigeons non figurés par Mme Knip (Mme Pauline Decourcelles) dans les deux volumes de MM. Temminck et Florent Prévost
Iconographie des pigeons non figurés par Mme Knip (Mme Pauline Decourcelles) dans les deux volumes de MM. Temminck et Florent Prévost
Iconographie des pigeons non figurés par Mme Knip (Mme Pauline Decourcelles) dans les deux volumes de MM. Temminck et Florent Prévost
Iconographie des pigeons non figurés par Mme Knip (Mme Pauline Decourcelles) dans les deux volumes de MM. Temminck et Florent Prévost
Iconographie des pigeons non figurés par Mme Knip (Mme Pauline Decourcelles) dans les deux volumes de MM. Temminck et Florent Prévost
Iconographie des pigeons non figurés par Mme Knip (Mme Pauline Decourcelles) dans les deux volumes de MM. Temminck et Florent Prévost
Iconographie des pigeons non figurés par Mme Knip (Mme Pauline Decourcelles) dans les deux volumes de MM. Temminck et Florent Prévost
Iconographie des pigeons non figurés par Mme Knip (Mme Pauline Decourcelles) dans les deux volumes de MM. Temminck et Florent Prévost
Iconographie des pigeons non figurés par Mme Knip (Mme Pauline Decourcelles) dans les deux volumes de MM. Temminck et Florent Prévost
Iconographie des pigeons non figurés par Mme Knip (Mme Pauline Decourcelles) dans les deux volumes de MM. Temminck et Florent Prévost

Iconographie des pigeons non figurés par Mme Knip (Mme Pauline Decourcelles) dans les deux volumes de MM. Temminck et Florent Prévost

BONAPARTE’S PIGEONS IN ITS ORIGINAL PARTS 

 

Iconographie des pigeons non figurés par Mme Knip (Mme Pauline Decourcelles) dans les deux volumes de MM. Temminck et Florent Prévost. Paris: L. Martinet for P. Bertrand, 1857[–1858].

Folio (22” x 14 5/16”, 557mm x 363mm): π-3π2 4π1 [59]1 χ-2χ1. 68 leaves, pp. [14] (half-title, imprint, title, blank, 4pp. dedication to Moquin-Tandon, 3pp. “clavis systematis,” table of genera, table of habitats, blank), [118] (text-leaf (often blank verso) for each of 55 plates as follows: I-IX, XI.1, XII&XI.2, XIII-XXI, XXII.1, XXII.2 (only 1 plate 21), XXIII-XXIV, 2XX, XXVI, XXVII (no plate 27 following), XXVIII, XXIX.1, XXIX.2 (only 1 plate 29), XXXIX-XXXVI, XXXVIII-XL, XLII, XLV, LI, LVII-LVIII, LXI-LXII, LXIX-LXX, LXXV, CII, CXVI, CXIX, CXXI.1, CXXI.2, CXXV (no pl. 125; its bird, Peristerea cinerea, is illustrated on pl. 2121), CXXVI, CXXXIII-CXXXIV, CXL), [4] (2pp. contents, publisher’s notice, blank). With 55 hand-colored lithographed plates, numbered as follows: 1-9, 11-19, 25, 21-24, 20, 26, 28-29, 31-36, 38-40, 42, 45, 51, 57-58, 61-62, 69-70, 75, 102, 116, 119, 121, 2121, 126, 133, 134, 140.

Original parts, loose within one of the publisher’s printed buff paper part-wrappers (completed in ink manuscript for livraison 9, including plates “29, 36, 38 à 40”). Presented in a blue cloth clam-shell box.

Wrapper torn, split and creased, albeit with very few losses. Damp-stains to the text leaves I and II and plates 1 and 2, as well as to pl. 2121. Foxed, mildly and evenly, throughout. Plates tanned, with ink-tanning verso. The odd marginal split or crease.


Charles-Lucien Jules Laurent Bonaparte, Prince of Canino and of Musignano (1803–1857) was the son of Napoleon’s younger brother Lucien. A native interest in birds flourished in New Jersey, where he joined his bride, Zénaïde (his first cousin, daughter of Napoleon’s older brother Joseph) at the Point Breeze estate where the king spent his exile after Napoleon’s death. In the early 1820’s, Bonaparte was a courtier-in-exile to his uncle while studying the birds of American. He also met American naturalists including Audubon (whom, in Gallic alliance, he failed to make a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences).

By 1826 Bonaparte, laden with his notes on American avifauna, returned to Europe and settled in Rome for a time, until his cousin Louis Bonaparte invaded in 1849. After a brief sojourn in the United Kingdom, Bonaparte settled in Paris where he remained till his death. There he may have met Pauline Rifer de Courcelles, known as Mme. Knip. A student of Barraband and a protégée of Marie Louise, Napoleon’s second wife, she had supplied illustrations for Coenraad Jacob Temminck’s Histoire naturelle des pigeons. The present work was conceived as a visual supplement to her celebrated bird portraits (many of whose original watercolors are handled by Arader).

The Iconographie was projected to run to 150 illustrations in thirty monthly livraisons. Bonaparte’s death in 1857 — after only four of the livraisons had been delivered — imperiled the project. Finally just twelve of the livraisons with 55 plates (all that had been finished at his decease) were seen through the press by Alfred Moquin-Tandon, professor of zoology at Marseille. The plates are by and after Paul-Louis Oudart, F(rançois?) Willy and Émile Blanchard, and continue in Knip’s tradition of mid-century French bird art at its apex.

The work is rare in parts; volumes sometimes include part-wrappers but unbound examples are essentially unknown to the trade. The present set collates complete against Nissen, or superior, as it has 68 leaves as opposed to his recorded 62 (pages, surely an error); it collates complete against Ayer/Zimmer. Nissen and Ayer also record a plate 125, whereas the present set has two plates numbered 121 (as does our Fairhaven set), the second with the bird described in the text-leaf for that plate. Perhaps this is an earlier state?

Ayer/Zimmer p. 78; Nissen, IVB 117.

Item #JLR0862

Price: $14,000

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