- 1021
Sowerby, James & Edward Lear
Estimate
3,000 - 5,000 USD
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Description
- Tortoises, Terrapins, and Turtles drawn from life. Text by John Edward Gray. London, Paris and Frankfurt: Taylor & Francis for Henry Sotheran and Joseph Baer & Co., 1872
- printed books
Folio (14 1/2 x 11 ins.; 365 x 280 mm). Sixty-one lithographed plates by Edward Lear after J.D.C. Sowerby; three plates spotted, recto of last plate toned. Original publisher's cloth, spine title gilt; minor rubbing to spine ends and corners.
Provenance
Christie's New York, December 10, 2001, lot 218. acquisition: Purchased at the foregoing sale
Literature
Nissen ZBI 1701; Wood, p. 429
Catalogue Note
The first complete edition of these plates. Forty of the plates had been published in Thomas Bell's Monograph of the Testudinata, 1836-1842, which was never completed. The remaining plates lay unprinted for thirty years until Sotheran took them over. The work is more commonly found with sixty plates and not the sixty-one as in the present copy.