Catalogues & Lists

Costume

Whether in the highly stylized aesthetic of the Parisian art deco designer George Barbier, pioneering anthropologies in voyage accounts, in maps, portraits, games or tools for teaching the young, this month’s themed list explores costume in all its forms. Often images were so striking they re-occur in accounts decades — or centuries later. The spirit behind many of the works is...

Zoological Illustrations

Our featured item is William Swainson’s Zoological Illustrations—a particularly attractive set of both the first and second series of this beautiful work of natural history. The importance of this work to Australian and Pacific natural history cannot be overestimated: several plates feature Australian specimens figured for the first time, while many of the illustrations are derived from the collections of...

Icones Piscium

Our featured item is a slim work of great beauty, John Richardson’s Icones Piscium: the first separately published work on Australian fishes, the plates after drawings by James Barker Emery, the first Lieutenant on the Beagle voyage during her survey of the Australian coast 1837-1841.

Greenland Inuit

A very finely painted depiction of a traditional Greenlandic Inuit hunter after harp seals in his distinctive hunting kayak. The unsigned watercolour is of considerable quality and style, and depicts an Inuit pursuit with a level of detail whose accuracy modern historical sources now confirm.

California 2018

Our February catalogue has been prepared for upcoming exhibitions in California.The list encompasses treasures relating to Cook's Voyages: the first American edition of Hawkesworth; the two surreptitious accounts by Marra and Magra; a highly unusual copy of Parkinson with the plates in duplicate; Webber's Views of the South Seas; and a great rarity--the French edition of Samwell's Death of Cook--no copy has appeared...

Darwin's Fuegians

John Hayter's striking portrait of the three Yahgans ("Fuegians") who accompanied Charles Darwin on the Beagle voyage is featured above. (The full account of the Beagle voyage may also be viewed here) Darwin's experience with the Yahgans both on the voyage and in their homeland can be singled out as formative in his development of ideas for both the Origin and for...

Australia

The land Australia: imagined, invented, recounted, mapped, colonised, explored, settled, and celebrated in our final major catalogue for the year. We invite you to discover over 200 years of rare printed, manuscript, cartographic and visual materials relating to the Southern Continent. From Herrera's account of Schouten & Le Maire's voyage in search of Terra Australis to Pelsaert's 1647 Batavia account with its astonishing...