The John Golden Library: Book Illustration in the Age of Scientific Discovery
Sale #N11113
Small in number of volumes, but massive in visual impact, the books in the John Golden Library meticulously integrate natural history, travel, and Americana into a visually mesmerizing representation of the apex of the illustrated book in the golden age of scientific discovery. Botany, ornithology, and zoology—navigation, exploration, and travel—medicine, agriculture, and gardening—cartography, ethnology, dendrology, and lepidopterology—virtually every aspect of human investigation of the natural world from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries is illuminated in this collection, from the constellations in the heavens to the shells of the mollusks in the depths of the sea.
The roster of artists represented in the library is just as remarkable as its range of subject: John James Audubon, universally regarded as the greatest of all bird painters; Pierre-Joseph Redouté, “the Raphael of Flowers”; Georg Dionysius Ehret, who combined botany and artistry more successfully than anyone else in the eighteenth century; Maria Sybylla Merian, the first European woman to travel to South America on an independent scientific expedition; Ferdinand Bauer, who died in anonymity, but is now recognized as the most exacting botanical draughtsman who ever lived; Joseph Wolf, described by Daniel Giraud Elliot as wielding a “magical pencil … devoted to scientific illustration”; and many others of equal renown, including Franz Michael Regenfuss, Nicolas Robert, Abraham Bosse, Charles Bird King, Priscilla Susan Bury, Alexander Wilson, and Mark Catesby.
The books in the Golden Library also provide a master class in the method and execution of book illustration from simple woodcuts to the most sophisticated etching and engraving processes, often enhanced with stipple, aquatint, mezzotint, and, in the case of the Merian Rupsen Begin, counterproof impressions. The later age of scientific discovery saw the invention and refinement of lithography, and most of the nineteenth-century works are illustrated by this technique, including the great American ornithological works by Audubon and Elliot. The Golden Library also demonstrates a full range of coloring techniques: several methods of color-printing; coloring by hand, sometimes accomplished by artists intimately involved with the creation of the plates and sometimes heightened with gum arabic, silver, and gold; and original watercolor drawings.
A final component of the John Golden Library deserves recognition as well: the distinguished provenance of so many of the books. The library is built of copies from many of the most celebrated single-owner book auctions of the last four decades: Robert de Belder, H. Bradley Martin, Estelle Doheny, Peter Jay Sharp, Nicolas Von Hoffman, Frank S. Streeter, Laird U. Park, George M. Pflaumer, William Foyle, Árpád Plesch, Michael J. Kuse, Lord Wardington, Jacques Levy, and Frederick, 2nd Lord Hesketh.
The collector’s surname provides a fitting eponym, for his discriminating connoisseurship truly formed a Golden Library.
12pm
Sotheby's - New York
1334 York Avenue
New York, NY
40.766298063691, -73.9535541
Sotheby's - New York
