Beschreibung:

THOMAS MARTYN (fl.1760-1816) The Universal Conchologist, exhibiting the figure of every known shell accurately drawn and painted after nature . [London: for the author, n.d. but 1784 and later, some plates watermarked 1824]--A collection of 40 engraved plates from the work (275 x 380mm and smaller), all finely handcoloured to resemble original watercolours, most within a black ink-ruled frame and including 4 plates present in two states, some with contemporary and/or later manuscript captions. (Some plates with scattered light spotting or light dampmarking, some captions trimmed.) FORTY PLATES FROM 'ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL OF ALL SHELL BOOKS, CONTAINING EXQUISITE RENDERINGS OF SHELLS COLLECTED ON COOK'S THREE VOYAGES and on other voyages, with specimens identified as having been obtained from New Holland, New Zealand, Tahiti, Tonga, and the Hawaiian Islands' ( Hawaiian National Bibliography 80). The eighteenth-century passion for conchology--practised by such distinguished collectors and connoisseurs as Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, second Duchess of Portland, Sir Joseph Banks, Pierre Lyonet, Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, and Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria--generated a vigorous (and voracious) market for exotic rarities and previously-unknown specimens. As an example of the astronomical prices paid for fine examples (which echoed the tulipomania of the previous century, in spite of the political upheavals of the period), the posthumous sale of Lyonet's collections in 1791 may be cited; this auction saw his exemplum of the 'Nautile vitré' realise 299 guilders, whilst Vermeer's 'Woman in Blue Reading a Letter' sold for 41 guilders. The lucrative market for shells meant that the examples brought back from Cook's First and Second Voyages found a ready market in London; of those acquired during the Third Voyage, the majority were bought by Thomas Martyn, as he stated in a letter of 9 December 1780: 'I may venture to affirm that I have purchased, amounting to 400 guineas, more than 2 thirds of the whole brought home. Nevertheless I do not abound either in variety of the new or many duplicates of the known ones that are valuable' (quoted in: P. Dance Shell Collecting (London: 1966), p.100), reiterating in a letter of 18 December 1780, 'I repeat it again 2/3rds. of the whole from the 2 ships [i.e. Resolution and Discovery ] were bought by me. All the rest of the shells are positively in the cabinets of Mr Banks, Dr Fordyce & two other Gentleman' (quoted in: P. Dance loc . cit .). Martyn's Universal Conchologist used these shells, together with specimens from the cabinets of the Duchess of Portland, the Countess of Bute, John Hunter and others, as models for the 160 plates, and the work sought to give both scientists and connoisseurs a systematic treatise on shells, which was carefully and clearly illustrated. As Martyn states in the preface: 'complicated systems, bad arrangements, and the practice of crowding many sheets of different families into one plate, have not only confused the subject, and created a distaste to the science itself, but made it necessary that even the most experienced collector should have some clew to conduct him through those labyrinths of difficulties' ( Universal Conchologist , p.4). By comparison with such works, the shells on Martyn's plates are beautifully detailed and very clearly displayed; the first eighty plates each showing two shells, the second eighty with one shell per plate (although, since the shells from Cook's last voyage yielded a far lower proportion of previously-unknown examples than Martyn had anticipated, the plates depict fewer examples than the author had originally desired). The exquisitely-coloured plates with their barely-visible printed bases and dense hand-colouring were the work of an academy of indigent young artists recruited by Martyn. His early experiments, using independent and established artists to colour his engravings, had proved costly and unsati