Bold and Beautiful Natural History: Fine and Rare Prints at Auction in Dallas

Treasure trove for collectors, designers and print dealers; names like Audubon, Selby, Elliot and Redouté highlight Heritage June 17 auction

Dallas, TX: A large single-owner collection of beautiful hand-colored natural history plates encompassing botany and ornithology, as well as smaller groupings of mammals, snakes, reptiles and amphibians, will highlight an auction of Rare Books, June 16-17, at Heritage Auction Galleries.

Sure to be prized as much for their decorative value as for their historical importance, these prints are coming to auction from the archives of a prestigious institution that received the prints as a donation from an avid collector. They contain some of the most important names in the canon of famous natural history artists and publishers.

"The big names in the auction are quite familiar to naturalists and historians alike," said James Gannon, Director of Rare Books at Heritage. "They're also staples for high-end designers and their clients. Prints by Audubon, Selby, Elliot, Redouté, Gould and Brookshaw are very popular as decorative art. These are the types of prints you see hanging on walls in places like The Hamptons, Manhattan and Martha's Vineyard, not to mention the Hollywood Hills or in getaways in The Rockies or Mammoth Valley."

Most natural history prints, like the ones presented in this auction, began their journeys as hand-colored lithographs, engravings or plates in one of a handful of important natural history books from a handful of famous publishers who produced bound volumes in the mid-to-late 1800s. As the decades wore on, dealers, designers and collectors alike began to understand the inherent value in the different illustrations on their own terms, as works of art, and began selling the prints individually.

The entire collection is being sold without reserves, so competitive bidding is expected.

"The plates in the auction, typically, are the largest versions printed of these beautiful illustrations of flora and fauna," said Gannon. "The real appeal of these prints comes from their originality, their vibrant colors, the way they captured very seldom seen aspects of the natural world when they were created, and the power the images still convey today."

Not all the top lots in this collection will come in the way of single hand-colored prints. Two complete sets in particular are the subject of much pre-auction speculation as much for their rarity as complete volumes as for their potential value. The two sets feature possibly the two most famous names in natural history illustration: John James Audubon - The Quadrupeds of North America, in three volumes - and Pierre Joseph Redouté - Les Roses, from 1824.

Audubon also features prominently in the print section of the natural history grouping with several offerings from his two nineteenth-century double-elephant folio editions by Havell and Bien, with two rare and spectacular plates: Bird of Washington - Plate XI from the Havell Edition, an impressive hand-colored aquatint engraving from the first edition of The Birds of America (London: 1827-1838), and Dycoteles Torquatus - Plate XXXI of the Bowen Edition, is a fantastic lithograph of the Collared Peccary, or the Javelina, hand-colored and dated 1844, from the imperial folio edition of Audubon's The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (Philadelphia: 1845-1848).

Other highlights of the prints section include, but are certainly not limited to: Daniel Giraud Elliot's Pavo Cristatus (Common Peafowl), a fine hand-colored lithographic plate from Elliot's great monograph on Pheasants; Pierre Joseph Redouté's Amaryllis, a fine hand-colored plate from his Les Liliacees (Paris: 1802-1816); John Gould's Bubo Maximus, a hand-colored lithograph of the imperious Eagle Owl from Gould's Birds of Great Britain (London: 1862-1873); and George Brookshaw's Black Antigua - Plate LV, is a superb aquatint engraving of a pineapple, with some hand-coloring, from Brookshaw's Pomona Britannica; or, A Collection of the Most Esteemed Fruits (London: 1804-1812).

Also, the contributions of illustrator Edward Lear deserve special mention. Lear was a well-known ornithological illustrator until he found widespread fame and success for his morbid drawings and wild nonsense poetry. He is represented in the auction via several lots, most interestingly in his Macrocercus Hyacinthinus - Hyacinthine Maccaw, a beautiful and brilliant hand-colored lithograph from his Illustrations of the Family Psittacidae, or Parrots (London: 1830-1832).

For more information on this auction, to read detailed lot descriptions for these, and all other lots, and to download fully-enlargeable color images, go online to www.HA.com/6025 or call 800-872-6467, ext. 1609, or email JamesG@HA.com.