A Monograph of the Trochilidae, or Family of Humming-Birds. [with:] Supplement completed after the author's death by R. Bowdler Sharpe.

London: published by the author, [1849]-1861; supplement by Henry Sotheran & Co 1887 ,Together 6 volumes, folio, complete with the posthumous supplement, Contemporary green half morocco, the spines divided into six compartments by double raised bands, gilt-lettered in two compartments, the others richly gilt, the sides with wide gilt borders built up from massed rolls, triple gilt rules to board edges, cream doublures and endpapers, turn-ins richly gilt all round, edges gilt, 418 hand-coloured lithographs, many highlighted in gold leaf over-painted with transparent oil and varnish colours, after John Gould, H. C. Richter and W. Hart.

An outstanding set, the colours fresh and bright, the paper clean and strong throughout, in fine Publisher’s bindings.

First editions. Gould’s “masterpiece [is] an incomparable catalogue and compendium of beauties” (“Fine Bird Books”). Gould maintained an obsessive fascination for humming-birds: “These wonderful works of creation… my thoughts are often directed to them in the day, and my night dreams have not infrequently carried me to their native forests in the distant country of America” (Gould “Preface”). During his lifetime he identified more than 400 species of humming-bird; Linnaeus, by comparison, only identified 22. Gould’s own remarkable collection of 1,500 mounted humming-birds was exhibited in the Zoological Gardens, Regent’s Park, during the Great Exhibition of 1851. It attracted 75,000 visitors, including Queen Victoria, who recorded in her diary: ”It is impossible to imagine anything so lovely as these little Humming Birds, their variety, and the extraordinary brilliance of their colours”. In his superb hand-coloured lithographs Gould endeavoured to reproduce that brilliant natural iridescence of the humming-birds by the application of gold leaf.
Gould died after the publication of part 1 of the Supplement. He had already supervised the preparation of many of the plates, and the project was completed by Sharpe for the text, W. Hart, who did the drawings, lithographs and colouring for the 58 remaining plates, and the ornithologist Osbert Salvin, who directed the general production. Soon after Gould’s death his bird collections, which by then included 5,378 humming-birds, were purchased by the Zoological Society, and are now part of the British Museum’s natural history collections.

Anker 177, 182; Diane Donaldson “Picturing Animals in Britain 1750-1850”, pp. 59-60; “Fine Bird Books” (1990) p. 102; Nissen 380; Sauer 16, 22, 29; Wood p. 365