The Cabinet of Natural History and American Rural Sports.

Philadelphia: J. and T. Doughty, 1830-33. First edition of "The first color-plate sporting book printed in America"(Grolier/Henderson). Quarto, 3 volumes. bound in contemporary half morocco over marbled boards, top edge gilt. Three engraved titles, 2 engraved portraits, and 57 lithographic plates after Thomas Doughty and others (comprising 53 hand-colored lithographs, one colored etching, two uncolored engravings and one uncolored wood-engraving), 17 in-text wood engravings, index leaves printed on blue paper trimmed, mounted, and bound into vol.III. According to Bennett, Volume III is perhaps the most difficult of all American sport items to find...Artistically Vol. 1 is much the most important, for it contains the original plates by Thos. Doughty, famous painter and founding-father of the Hudson River School." Bennett, p. 35; Grolier/Henderson, p. 40; Howes D-433; Thomas Doughty, one of America's greatest landscape painters "apparently taught himself how to paint, and around 1816 he painted his first landscapes. It was also at this time that he listed his occupation as "painter" in the Philadelphia register, among the first American artists to do so. He was an avid hunter and fisherman whose intense love of nature inspired him to capture the serenity and joy he experienced in the wooded hills and along the quiet streams of the Northeast" (Britt Steen Zuniga for DNB). Bennett, page 35; Henderson, page 37;Howes D433; Reese, American Color Plate Books 12.