Dictionnaire des sciences naturelles: Planches Zoologie: Ornithologie

Very good copy of the Birds volume from Cuvier's huge Dictionary of Natural Sciences

Complete with all 119 hand-coloured stipple engraved plates of birds

Birds include the extinct orange-wattled kokako, Alagoas curassow and Cuban red macaw.

All the illustrations by Jean-Gabriel Prêtre, under the direction of Pierre Jean François Turpin, and engraved by Louis Massard, Madame Rebel, Guyard, Bourey, Giraud, Coutant, etc.

Ornithologie: Title page, 16pp (table of plates, index), 119 handcoloured engraved plates.

Part of Cuvier's massive Dictionary of Natural Sciences that was published in 60 text volumes and 13 plate volumes from 1816 to 1830.

Jean-Gabriel Prêtre (1768-1849) was a Swiss-French natural history painter who illustrated a large number of books for Cuvier, Louis Pierre Vieillot, René Primevère Lesson, Comte de Lacépède, Richard Achille, and many other French zoologists.

Pierre Jean François Turpin (1775-1840) was a French botanist and illustrator. He is considered one of the greatest floral and botanical illustrators during the Napoleonic Era and after.

Half brown leather, spine with raised bands and gilt title, leather dry and rubbed, marbled boards and endpapers, book block mostly solid but with a few plates loose. Stipple engraved plates mostly clean apart from slight spotting to edges (four with dark toning over the entire plate), pencil notes on a few, but hand-colour vivid and bright.

Very good copy of this increasingly rare series by two giants of natural history illustration.