Smyrna Kingfisher

This originally hand-colored bird lithograph is from Henry Dresser’s History of the Birds of Europe. This is from the first edition published in London by the author between 1871 and 1896.

Dresser’s monumental work was the first complete avifuana of Europe since the work of John Gould. Each plate featured detailed lithography and finely applied hand-coloring, making it one of the finest works of the ornithological world. There were only an estimated 240 copies of this work printed and is one of the last publications to contain original hand coloring.

The plates from the work were completed J.G. Keuelmans, J. Wolf, E. Neale, and A. Thorburn. Keuelmans is known far and wide for his talents as a natural history artist and composed the majority of the plates for the work. The images were drawn from Dresser’s own collection of 12,000 specimens.

History of the Birds of Europe is monumental in its field for its inclusive nature of all European birds. It encompassed the entire Western Palaearctic Region which Dresser noted comprised “the whole of continental Europe to the Ural range, Scandinavia, Spitzbergen, the British Isles, Iceland, the Faeroes, the Azores, Madeira, and the Canary Isles, a comparatively narrow strip of North Africa, reaching to the border of the desert, Asia Minor (excluding the Jordan valley, which is essentially Ethiopia), and the Caucasus.”

Henry Eeles Dresser (1838-1915) was a leading figure in ornithological circles. He was elected a Member of the British Ornithologists’ Union in 1865 and served as its secretary from 1882 to 1888. He was a member and fellow of the Linnean and Zoological societies of London and an honorary fellow of the American Ornithologists’ Union.

Provenance: The Earl of Cromer