66 ‘THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOK ON INDIAN SPORT IN EXISTENCE’


260. WILLIAMSON, Captain Thomas and Samuel HOWITT (artist). Oriental Field Sports; being a Complete, Detailed, and Accurate Description of the Wild Sports of the East; and Exhibiting, in a Novel and Interesting Manner, the Natural History of the Elephant, the Rhinoceros, the Tiger, the Leopard, the Bear, the Deer, the Buffalo, the Wolf, the Wild Hog, the Jackall, the Wild Dog, the Civet, and other Undomesticated Animals: as Likewise the Different Species of Feathered Game, Fishes, and Serpents. The Whole Interspersed with a Variety of Original, Authentic, and Curious Anecdotes, which Render the Work Replete with Infromation and Amusement. The Scenerey Gives a Faithful Representation of that Picturesque Country, together with the Manners and Customs of both the Native and the European Inhabitants. The Narrative is Divided into Forty Heads, Forming Collectively a Complete Work. London: William Bulmer and Co. Shakspeare Printing Office for Edward Orme, 1807.


£19,500


Oblong broadsheets (448 x 567mm), 20 parts in one volume. Modern half calf gilt over contemporary marbled boards, retaining the original spine, gilt in compartments and lettered in one, modern mid-brown endpapers; pp. [4 (title, verso blank, dedication, verso blank)], ii (preface), 150, [2 (list of plates, verso blank), all text ll. watermarked ‘E&P | 1804’, except for dedication (‘J Whatman | 1804’) and l. 75, the last l. of index (‘Ruse & Turners | 1805’); additional title pochoir-stencilled in colours, watermarked ‘W Elga[r] | 1802’, and 40 hand-coloured plates, all aquatint except 2 stipple-engraved with aquatint and one soft-ground with aquatint by H. Merke, J. Hamble, and Viveres after Howitt’s drawings after Williamson, titled in English and French and numbered I-XL, plates I-VIII, X-XVII, XXI, XXVI, XXVIII, XXX-XXXI, XXXIII, XXXV, and XXXVII-XXXIX watermarked ‘J Whatman | 1804’ and plates IX, XVIII-XX, XXII-XXV, XXVII, XXIX, XXXII, XXXIV, XXXVI, and XL watermarked ‘E&P | 1804’, additional [?proof] plate pochoir-stencilled in colours with design of additional title and with title text but without imprint text; boards slightly rubbed causing loss of paper on board-edges, some light browning, offsetting or marking, final ll. slightly creased, list of plates with short tear at gutter, additional [?proof] plate guarded in and with traces of old repairs to upper margin, additional title guarded in and with vertical crease with short tears, old marginal repairs on versos of l. 44 and plate XXII,


nonetheless a very good copy of the work, with bright and fresh colour, and generous margins; provenance: ‘For my dear little friends at Wyarton G.T.G.-F. 20th Sep. 1893’ (inscription on front free endpaper).


First edition. ‘The most beautiful book on Indian sport in existence’ (Schwerdt), bound up from the 20 original parts and therefore containing ‘the finest impressions of the plates’ (Tooley). Oriental Field Sports is composed of a frontispiece and forty fine hand-coloured aquatint plates, which were drawn by the keen sportsman and accomplished artist and etcher Samuel Howitt (1756/7-1823) from the original designs by the Bengal Army officer Captain Thomas George Williamson (circa 1760-1817), who also wrote the accompanying explanatory text. Williamson had travelled to India in 1778 aged about 19, and was commissioned into the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd European Regiment in 1779. For the following twenty years, Williamson served in the East India Company’s Bengal Army in India and Malaysia, before an ill-judged letter, which criticised Lord Cornwallis’ plans for the army in India, was published in the Calcutta Telegraph on 17 March 1798, under the pseudonym ‘Mentor’. A modern historian characterises the letter thus: ‘Seething with at first barely concealed anger [Williamson] throws common sense to the winds as he covers page after page, and his manner of address develops from restrained hectoring to outright insult’ (O. Edwards ‘Captain Thomas Williamson of India’ in Modern Asian Studies 14, 4 (1980), pp. 673-682 at p. 678), and an official investigation of the letter and (apparently) suppression of the ensuing issue of the journal followed swiftly. Once Williamson was identified as the author, he was suspended by the army and sent home to England, not to be reinstated, although he was allowed, three years later, to retire on half- pay. (In India Observed (London: 1982), M. Archer and R. Lightbown also suggest that ‘There may, however, have been deeper reasons. Williamson had liberal opinions and took a humane attitude to the controversial issue of providing free passages to England for children born to the British by Indian “wives”. It may have been his views on such subjects which led to his banishment from India’, p. 67.)


Newly impoverished and thrown back on his own resources, Williamson set up a musical shop on The Strand, selling music, intruments, etc. and also published a number of his own compositions: ‘Some of his songs, “The Daffodil”, “Since in the Mirror of my Eyes”, and ‘“Ra’ma’nee”, are to his own translation of poems by Yuqueen and Sonda, and he has the distinction of being amongst the earliest to publish transcriptions of Indian music, in his 1st and 2nd Collections of Original Hindostanee Airs, opp. 4 and 9 (c. 1800)’ (op. cit, p. 680). However, Williamson’s great interest appears to have been writing, and he is believed to have closed the shop in circa 1802, to concentrate on his books. Wide-ranging — they included a triple-decker novel, an angler’s guide, and a mathematical text-book — his writings naturally capitalised on his experience of India, and apart from the songs and Oriental Field Sports (1807), his other Asian books are The East India Vade-Mecum: or, Complete Guide to Gentlemen Intended for the Civil, Military, or Naval Service of the Hon. East India Company (London: 1808) and The European in India: from a Collection of Drawings by Charles Doyley ... with a Preface and Copious Descriptions by Captain Thomas Williamson (London: 1813). However, none of these enterprises brought him the fortune he had hoped for, and he died in poverty in 1817, as the Gentleman’s Magazine reported in its obituary pages: ‘At Paris, Capt Williamson, author of “Indian Field Sports”. In a private letter received from Paris the account is given in the following terms: “Against the English church here is stuck up a notice of the death of Capt. Williamson leaving a wife and 7 children destitute”’ (vol. LXXXVII, 1817, p. 637).


Of these works, the best-known and most celebrated was Oriental Field Sports, of which Martin Hardie states, ‘The book is not only a mine of information as to the manners, customs, scenery, and costume of India, but contains one of the finest series of sporting plates ever published’ (English Coloured Books (London: 1906), p. 136). Widely admired for its dramatic images depicting the pursuit of tigers, elephants and all manner of prey by English and Indian hunters on foot or on elephants, Oriental Field Sports was issued in parts between 1805 and 1807. The text leaves bearing pp. 1 to 140 appearing sequentially in parts 1 to 19, and the pre- and postliminary leaves in part 20, but the plates were not issued in sequential order, and the plates in the Abbey copy had variant numbering, with two plates numbered XVI, two numbered XVII, two numbered XVIII, and none numbered XI, XV, or XXXIII, and those which appeared in parts 1 to 14 were watermarked ‘J Whatman | 1804’ and those in parts 15 to 20 were watermarked ‘E&P | 1804’. In this copy, the plates are consecutively numbered, except for plates XIII and XIV where the numbering is transposed (although the titles are correct), and the pattern of watermarks in the plates follows that given by Abbey, with the exceptions of plates IX, XVIII, and XIX. Plate XXXI is in Tooley’s presumed first issue, reading ‘Hunting Jackalls’ (and not ‘Jackals Rescueing [sic] a Hunted Brother’), and the text and plates bear early watermarks. This copy does not retain the slip advertising Howitt’s British Field Sports, which Tooley notes is contained in part 20.


Complete copies of Oriental Field Sports in very good condition with such fresh and delicate colour as this have become increasingly rare on the market: in 1906, Martin Hardie complained strongly in his English Coloured Books that bookseller’s catalogues encouraged the ‘ruthless destruction’ of fine colour-plate books, adding ‘Of [...] Oriental Field Sports it is said —”These famous plates measure 22 x 18 inches, and framed would make a fascinating


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