"VERY RARE'' - SITWELL (BIRDS.) Robert, Havell, Jr. A Collection of the Birds of Paradise. Color-printed engraved title, finished by hand, and 13 (of 22) aquatint plates after Barraband, hand-colored and finished with gum arabic, with an additional variant coloring of one plate (together 15 leaves). Folio sheets, 450x295 mm, unbound; two plates trimmed at top and bottom, the rest untrimmed, very lightly and evenly toned, a few marginal tears. [London:] R. Havell, [circa 1835]
Havell was working on Audubon's Birds of America when he undertook the reproduciton, in reduced form, of some of the plates from Levaillant's Histoire naturelle des oiseaux de paradis. We find only two complete examples at auction in the last fifty years: the Bradley Martin copy in 1989, and Robert Havell's own copy in 2004. Nissen, IVB, 415; Nissen, SVB, 223; Sitwell, page 105.
