L'histoire naturelle, éclaircie dans une des ses parties principales, l'ornithologie, qui traite des oiseaux de terre, de mer et de riviere, tant de nos climats que des pays étrangers. Ouvrage traduit du Latin du Synopsis avium de Ray, augmenté d'un grand nombre de descriptions & de remarques historiques sur le caractere des Oiseaux, leur industrie & leurs ruses. Par M. Salerne, Docteur en Médecine à Orléans, Correspondant de l'Académie Royale des Sciences. Enrichi de trente-une Figures dessinées d'après nature
RICHLY BOUND AND SUPERBLY COLORED
Paris: Didot for Debure Pere, 1767. First edition in French.
Quarto (11 5/8” x 8 ½”, 295mm x 215mm): binder’s blank, a4 b4 A-Mmm4, binder’s blank [$2 signed]. 240 leaves, pp. i-v (half-title, blank, title, blank, dedication) vj-xij [4] (2pp. privilege, errata, to the binder) 1 2-464. With 31 hand-colored engraved plates, heightened in gum arabic, by and after François-Nicolas Martinet (except for the frontispiece: Martinet after Joseph de Longuœil).
Bound in contemporary red morocco with a gilt festoon roll border. On the spine, five pairs of raised bands with green morocco inlaid between. Title and other gilt to the second panel. Gilt roll to the edges of the boards, and to the turn-ins. Blue silk end-papers. All edges of the text-block gilt. Green silk marking ribbon.
Scuffed and rubbed, particularly at the lower edge. Fore-corner bumped. Tanned throughout, with some passages of moderate tanning. Pigment bleed at some of the plates, with faint offsetting. Damp-stain to the upper fore-corner of Ddd3 through to the rear cover, with some blue pigment bleed from Mmm1 to the rear end-paper. Worm-track at the gutter Bbb3-Ccc4 not affecting the text or plates. Small losses (insect) to the silk of the front end-papers and to the binder’s blank at the fore-edge. German translations to the captions in plates 2-4 in ink manuscript. Armorial bookplate of Rudolf von Gutmann to the verso of the first free end-paper.
John Ray (1627–1705) was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, long a hub of natural science. Ray’s pupil Francis Willughby (1635–1672) revolutionized the taxonomy of birds by classing them not according to their edibility or personalities, but by the ways their habitat and behavior interacted with their physical forms. He died young, however, and it was Ray who brought his work to press as the Ornithologiae libri tres... (London, 1676). Ray continued the study of birds throughout his life, and the Synopsis methodica Avium & Piscium was published posthumously in 1713 (London: William Innys).
The present work is a translation into French (along with some additions) of the avian portion of that work by François Salerne (1706–1760), also published posthumously. Salerne was a medical doctor who practiced at Orléans, and was elected a member of the Académie royale des sciences in 1747. Whereas Ray’s Synopsis was illustrated with just two plates, the Ornithologie boasts a galante frontispiece and thirty ornithological plates by François-Nicolas Martinet, who from 1756 was graveur au Cabinet du Roi. Geoffrey Keynes in his bibliography of Ray notes that “a few copies were issued in a morocco binding with the plates colored by hand;” the quality of the binding and of the coloring all but guarantees that this is one such example.
The German captions to the first three bird plates appear to be in a XIXc hand. The volumes belonged to the distinguished Austrian collector Rudolf von Guttman (1880–1966), who in addition to books collected engravings by Rembrandt and Dürer and pictures by Hondecoeter and others. Guttman’s collections were seized by the Nazis (he fled with his wife to Canada) and after the war he sought and achieved restitution of a great deal of it. The volume was sold in his Sotheby’s London sale 2 April 1993, lot 78. The volume then came to be housed in an apartment on the Quai d’Orsay in Paris that was designed by the renowned decorator Alberto Pinto; the volume was lot 163 in the Christie’s Paris sale of that anonymous collector, 29 June 2022.
Anker 414; Cohen-de Ricci, col. 854; Keynes, Ray 106; Nissen, IVB 757; Sitwell, Fine Bird Books p. 101.
Item #JLR0882
Price: $35,000