DE SCHWEINITZ, Lewis David (1780-1834) - photo 1
DE SCHWEINITZ, Lewis David (1780-1834) - photo 2
DE SCHWEINITZ, Lewis David (1780-1834) - photo 3
DE SCHWEINITZ, Lewis David (1780-1834) - photo 4
DE SCHWEINITZ, Lewis David (1780-1834) - photo 5

DE SCHWEINITZ, Lewis David (1780-1834)

Lot 56
13.07.2022 10:30UTC +00:00
Classic
Starting price
£ 4 000
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 794494
Lot 56 | DE SCHWEINITZ, Lewis David (1780-1834)
Estimate value
£ 4 000 – 6 000
DE SCHWEINITZ, Lewis David (1780-1834)

‘Fungorum Niskiensium Iconum’, an album of mycological watercolours [Niesky, Germany, c.1805]

260 x 190mm. 29 filled pages, comprising a three-page index in autograph with additions in another hand preceding watercolours and some preparatory pencil sketches of c.50 species of fungus, these pages numbered 1-25 in pencil, the majority of the watercolours labelled in autograph with their Latin binomial scientific name and occasionally in pencil in another hand (some of the descriptive text lost where pages cropped). Red cloth binding.



Provenance: Lewis David de Schweinitz; brought by him to Pennsylvania in 1812 – Catherine Eliza Perceval (1811-1884), Philadelphia, 8 March 1826; her ownership inscription on a front free endpaper. By descent to her son – Sir Francis Charles Edward Denys-Burton, 3rd Baronet (1849–1922); his armorial bookplate pasted inside the upper cover.



A companion volume with the same Perceval and Denys provenance – as well as the same printed booklabel reading ‘W. Webster. Bookseller & Stationer. Late G. Fell. 60, Piccadilly’ affixed inside the upper cover – is held in the Farlow Reference Library of Cryptogamic Botany at Harvard University.



Early watercolours by the German-American botanist Lewis David von Schweinitz, the father of North American mycology, completed in preparation for his first publication on fungi. De Schweinitz co-authored his first mycological publication in 1805, in collaboration with J.B. von Albertini, his professor at the theological seminary in Niesky. Conspectus fungorum in Lusatiae, a survey of the fungi native to the area of Saxony in which he had resided since travelling to Germany from Pennsylvania as a teenager, is now considered a classic mycological text. A prolific and skilful watercolourist, de Schweinitz prepared the plates of illustrations appended to the Conspectus; a number of volumes of unpublished watercolours produced in preparation for this work survive, including the present manuscript. On returning to America in 1812, he continued his mycological surveying in Salem, North Carolina; his research here would later be published as the Synopsis Fungorum Carolinæ Superioris in 1822.





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No VAT on hammer price or buyer's premium.
Place of origin:Western Europe, Germany, Europe
Auction house category:Letters, documents and manuscripts
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
8 King Street, St. James's
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United Kingdom
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13.07.2022 – 13.07.2022
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