[BECKER, Wilhelm].
Album of the finest Birds of all countries.
Philadelphia: Weik & Wieck, [ca. 1850-1860].

Oblong quarto (10 3/8" x 13 15/16", 264mm x 353mm): with 25 hand-colored lithographed plates after Edouard Travies. Bound in moire pictorial boards, re-backed in grey cloth. All edges of the text-block gilt. Re-backed. Wear at the edges, with some rubbing and soiling to the covers. Mild tanning throughout, with occasional foxing. Small pencil numeration (a concordance?) to each plate.

Little about the present volume is not a mystery. Weik and Wieck (some claim that such a business existed in Philadelphia, others deny it) specialized in importing European-made plate books for an American audience. Their claim to be "Publishers & Importers" on the front cover uses the older sense of "publisher;" one who disseminates to the public, rather than producer. The plates' text is in English and in German, and so perhaps the target audience was the large population of German speakers (viz. Pennsylvania Dutch) around Philadelphia -- though it equally may have been a cost-saving mechanism, allowing the book to be sold in Germany as well.

There are two hints to the identity of the artistic forces behind the work. The first is "W. Becker del. & lith." at the lower spine-edge of the back cover. This is Wilhelm Becker, whose other works include David Kapp's new panorama of the Rhine (ca. 1856). He is difficult to trace, in part because another lithographer, Friedrich Wilhelm Becker, became rather more famous. Still, he likely belonged to that family of lithographers, the patriarch of which was Jakob Becker (1810-1872). It is possible though rather unlikely that he designed only the scrollwork covers and not the plates themselves. Indeed, at least two plates -- the shrike and the Asia plate, sequential -- bear the monogram JS (or SJ), like a dollar-sign with a tail -- and so will at least have been drawn by someone other than Becker. The plates are divided into four geographic sections: America (14 plates), Europa [sic] (5), Asia (1) and Australia (5), each plate with one to three individuals (usually two species).

They are in the style of Edouard Travies (1809-1865), perhaps the greatest XIXc French bird-painter, with fairly fully fleshed-out backgrounds, including flora and sometimes insects and even broader aspects of landscape. Vanishingly rare, the Album has come up for auction five times (twice in this millennium), and only 11 copies are recorded in institutional collections. Our copy came from the working archive of Sir Charles St. George Stephenson Clarke (Sotheby's London, 13 May 2004, lot 51), who from the 1970's built the largest collection of Travies material at his Sussex home, Broadhurst Manor. Not in Nissen, Stafleu-Cowan etc