Foreign Field Sports, Fisheries, Sporting Anecdotes, &c. &c. from Drawings by Messrs. Howitt, Atkinson, Clark, Manskirch, &c. With a Supplement of New South Wales. Containing One Hundred and Ten Plates
London, Published and sold by H.R. Young, 56 Paternoster-Row, 1819 [second edition]/ 1813.
Large quarto, [ii] (title, verso blank, bound without the half-title, as often), 170, [2] (index) pages plus 110 hand-coloured aquatints.
Contemporary straight-grained black morocco elaborately bordered with gilt and blind rolls, rebacked (retaining an early if not the original backstrip); covers slightly rubbed and bumped at the extremities, with the sides a little scuffed; some offsetting; occasional faint foxing and tanning; tiny puncture to one leaf, affecting one letter only (pages 141-2); occasional light fingermarks and other trifling signs of age and handling; an excellent copy.
The second edition of this fine collection of hunting and fishing scenes with text by Captain Thomas Williamson, complete with the 'Supplement of New South Wales' containing 10 plates of Australian Aboriginal people. The 1813 first edition of the supplement is described by Jonathan Wantrup as 'the very first book on the Australian Aborigines, a fact not often acknowledged. The plates represent in vivid style and good detail various aspects of Aboriginal life in the Port Jackson region. Some of the plates show hunting scenes such as kangaroo hunting, fishing, bird hunting, and smoking out possums. Other plates represent aspects of tribal life such as a corroboree, trial by spear, a war party, and a night scene in a camp. The plates are justly celebrated and are without question the most attractive and sympathetic of the early British depictions of the native inhabitants' (Wantrup 2023, page 368). While the plates are attributed to jobbing artist John Heaviside Clark for the designs, Wantrup argues convincingly that his contribution was limited to working up existing sketches by an artist active in Australia, and offers John William Lewin as the most likely contender. In this second edition, printed in a larger quarto format than the first, the text is reset, the principal differences being the addition of (continuous) page numbers and the omission of the separate title for the supplement. Abbey 3; Tooley 225; see Wantrup 213b. Provenance: mounted on the front pastedown are the bookplates of Nathan Sheinman; the Joel Spitz Collection with his inventory number 32 added in ink (Spitz's copy of the separate issue of the 1813 supplement, number 31, is now held by the Yale Center for British Art); and Harris Hollin.
Item #141373
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