This rare plate of a Wild Goose (Anas Anser) is from W Lewin’s Birds of Great Britain, 1789-94 First Edition. William Lewin (1747-95) was born and bought up in the East End of London and as a young man scraped a living together as a book illustrator and natural history painter. Birds of Great Britain is sometimes described as the rarest of all English bird books. Indeed, the first edition was limited to just 60 copies, as – unlike Catesby and Edwards, whose books were illustrated with hand-coloured copperplates – Lewin painted each plate of every single copy himself, a grand total of 19,380 illustrations for the whole print run. Lewin traced each image onto the paper than painted it using watercolours, making this edition both unique and highly prized in the history of bird illustration. The demand for Lewin's fine work from Birds of Great Britain, combined with the limits imposed by his having done its plates all by watercolour, led him in 1793 to begin a second edition of etched plates, allowing for more copies to be published. Size: 11.25in x 13.5in (28.5cm x 34.5cm)

Excellent with hand written title in lower margin.