Splendidly bound drawing book containing 18 unsigned, detailed, watercolour and gouache drawings of birds. The colourful birds appear to be drawn after the plates in Edward Donovan's The natural history of British birds, first published in instalments between 1794 and 1819. If so, the present drawings must have been added to the drawing book at least 10 years after it was bound.
The blank drawing-book was bound, according to the gold lettering on the back board, in 1784, and the tools identify it as the work of the most important and arguably the best bindery in the 18th-century Netherlands, dubbed the First Stadholder Bindery by Storm van Leeuwen. Since the names of the binders remain unknown, the name now used alludes to the fact that it produced many bindings by order of the Stadholder Willem V and presumably his father Willem IV. Its great importance rests on the number of its surviving bindings, the diversity of the work it produced, the quality of the tooling, the exceptionally large number of binding tools it must have owned and the length of time it must have been operating, from at least 1722 to 1793 (Storm van Leeuwen). The paper is laid, with no watermark, and appears to be quite consistent.
Occasional, minor foxing, but otherwise internally fine and clean. The binding shows only slight signs of wear, so both the album and the binding are in very good condition. A sumptuously bound album of attractive illustrations of British birds. For the binding: Jan Storm van Leeuwen, Bookbinding 18th century IIA, pp. 67-101; for images of the rolls etc.: Jan Storm van Leeuwen, De achttiende-eeuwse Haagse boekband, pp. 388-395.