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AN 18TH CENTURY HAND-TINTED ORNITHOLOGICAL LITHOGRAPH OF "NIGHT HAWKS" BY ALEXANDER WILSON

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AN 18TH CENTURY HAND-TINTED ORNITHOLOGICAL LITHOGRAPH OF  NIGHT HAWKS  BY ALEXANDER WILSON

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Auction Date:2008 Dec 11 @ 10:00 (UTC-05:00 : EST/CDT)
Location:128 The American Road, Morris Plains, New Jersey, United States
<b>AN 18TH CENTURY HAND-TINTED ORNITHOLOGICAL LITHOGRAPH OF "NIGHT HAWKS" BY ALEXANDER WILSON</b>
From Wilson`s "An Ornithology, or the Natural History of Birds in the United States", a multi-volume work published in Philadelphia by Bradford & Inskeep, 1808-1814. Together with a print of a hand-colored lithograph of a pheasant by the English naturalist Mark Catesby (1683-1749) from his monumental "Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands", 1731-1743, the first published account of the flora and fauna of North America. It included 220 plates of birds, reptiles and amphibians, fish, insects, and mammals. 2 pieces. In the decades before John James Audubon`s fame eclipsed his, Alexander Wilson (Scottish, 1766-1813), was considered the best of all painters of birds, and in his magnificent "American Ornithology" he combined meticulously accurate representations of the inhabitants of the American woods with some of the most concise, exact, informal and engaging nature writing ever put into print. When Audubon`s spectacular plates began to dazzle bird-lovers some 30 years after Wilson`s death, he drifted into obscurity as "the father of American ornithology," his hand-colored books locked away in rare-book collections. But he deserved better: he personally discovered 43 new species of American birds, pictured 264 species (out of the 343 species found within the territory of the U.S. of his time) and added familiar names to some 40 species, like the canvasback, which he was the first to paint and describe. Sight size the first 14 1/2"h x 10"w Mark Catesby - Rudolf Lesch Fine Arts, Inc., stock # 364