The Wildfowl Paintings of Henry Jones (Limited First Edition, Signed)

OLNEY, Peter J.S. (foreword Sir Peter Scott; biography Nigel Sitwell; paintings Henry Jones). The Wildfowl Paintings of Henry Jones. London: Threshold/Harrap, 1987.

Large oblong 4to (340 × 435 mm). Half navy Morocco leather and blue cloth boards. Spine with raised bands, lettered in gilt. Blue cloth solander case. 272 pp. Frontispiece and 60 full-colour plates, tipped in throughout. Appendix listing all bird paintings by Henry Jones in the possession of the Zoological Society of London. Bibliography. First edition. Limited edition of 350 numbered copies, signed by the author on the limitation page, this being number 94.

Major Henry Jones (1838–1921) spent his active career as a British army officer and his retirement in pursuit of a different kind of discipline entirely. Returning to Welling, near Woolwich, in 1881, he became a regular presence in the bird room of what is now the Natural History Museum in Kensington, studying the Museum's specimen collections with the systematic attention of a naturalist rather than the casual interest of an amateur. The watercolour paintings he produced over the following decades — precise, beautifully observed, and in their quiet way among the finest British bird paintings of the late Victorian period — were bequeathed at his death to the Zoological Society of London, where they remained, largely unpublished, until this monograph brought them to the wider audience they deserved.

The sixty paintings reproduced here cover the wildfowl of Britain and Europe: ducks, geese, and swans rendered with the accuracy of a man who had studied his subjects directly from museum specimens and, wherever possible, from living birds. Jones's technique is that of the careful scientific illustrator — detailed, true to colour and structure, attentive to the particular qualities that distinguish one species from another — but it is also the technique of a man with a genuine visual sensibility, and the plates have a life to them that purely diagrammatic illustration rarely achieves.

The foreword is by Sir Peter Scott (1909–1989), whose presence in these pages is entirely fitting. The son of Captain Robert Falcon Scott of Antarctic fame, Sir Peter was the most distinguished ornithologist and wildfowl artist of the twentieth century: founder of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge in 1946, co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund in 1961, the first person to be knighted for services to conservation, and himself a painter of wildfowl whose work in that tradition gives his introduction to Jones's paintings the authority of a practitioner. The biographical note on Jones is by Nigel Sitwell, and the text throughout is by Peter J.S. Olney of the Zoological Society of London, whose curatorial access to the original paintings and the ZSL's archive gives the scholarship a foundation unavailable to any outside researcher.

Fine throughout. A pristine copy. Solander case shows only very mild shelf markings.

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Catalogue Number: HH000619