A richly illustrated volume, which reproduces one of the finest collections of eighteenth-century ornithological art in its entirety.

In 1786, Austrian natural history artist Ferdinand Bauer traveled to Italy and the Levant. The watercolors he created from meticulous drawings made during the trip are among the finest examples of natural history illustration. Bauer’s botanical paintings are well known yet this industrious artist also made stunning illustrations of over a hundred different bird species, very few of which have been published until now.

This book describes Bauer’s early life, achievements, and his experiences of traveling for fifteen months—often facing the perils of weather, illness, bandits, and pirates. It also details his field method of recording the precise colors of the birds on his pencil drawings by employing his scheme of coloring by numbers, each representing a specific hue, to be used as a reference when he returned to Oxford.

Each illustration is reproduced alongside a facing page of vivid expert text describing the characteristics of each bird, interwoven with aspects of their ornithological and cultural history as well as comments on Bauer’s depictions. Not widely seen since they were painted approximately 230 years ago, and now reproduced in their entirety, these beautiful paintings represent one of the finest collections of late eighteenth-century ornithological art.