Just added, I have a very good selection of colorful prints from Edward Donovan’s Natural History of British Birds. Donovan was a British naturalist and collector who owned and operated a small museum and published several illustrated works describing and depicting birds, fish, insects, and plants. Published circa 1794 to 1819 in 10 volumes with a total of 244 plates, these prints are hand-colored copperplate engravings on Whatman paper (a few prints with partial watermarks as expected). The prints measure approximately 9-1/8 x 5-1/2 inches.
The plates are in good to excellent condition, some with toning or foxing, and a few with minor edge wear or other issues. Some of the plates have small pieces of mounting tape attached to the back. The thumbnail scans will give you a good idea of the relative paper tone which ranges from light cream to tanned. Hand-coloring is generally excellent with with strong colors. I obtained these plates with some of the corresponding text pages. These helped me identify the birds in most plates, but some plates lacked text. In these cases, I did my best to match the birds to Donovan’s nomenclature using online references. In a few cases, I could not locate Donovan’s name for the bird. In these cases, the birds are listed by the current common name if I could match the image based on appearance. Some of these birds are no longer native to Britain, or were mistakenly assumed by Donovan to be so.
These prints make charming groups. Priced to reflect condition, the toned ones are particular values if you do not mind prints with age on them.
