Field Sports, &c. &c. of the Native Inhabitants of New South Wales with ten plates by the Author

Quarto, 10 coloured aquatints; modern half calf, spine gilt-titled. A fine copy of the genuine first and separate issue of this important Australian plate book, the first work to be published on the First Nations people of New South Wales; it was also issued in black and white only. With separate title-page and unnumbered pages, and with watermarks dated 1811, it is distinct from later editions in which the plates appeared only as a supplement to a larger publication. Clark dedicated his work to the recently deposed William Bligh, with the unusually affectionate comment that it "may assist in keeping alive the recollection of a distant spot, where your exertions for your country, and for the benefit of mankind, have been so eminently displayed". The ten scenes are remarkable in the history of early colonial Australian art, offering good-natured and unprejudiced depictions of First Nations life in an era when pejorative representation was the norm. The scenes include smoking out possums, a kangaroo hunt, spearing birds on the wing, fishing from canoes, a native dance, painted warriors, men in single combat and an idyllic night scene. Delicately hand-coloured and expertly printed, the ten plates "are without question the most attractive and sympathetic of the early British depictions of the native inhabitants" (Wantrup, Australian Rare Books, 2 edn., pp. 367-370). Although the dedication leaf and plates are signed by John Heaviside Clark, he was a commercial artist working in London, turning original sketches into finished drawings ready for the engraving process, and would not have been the artist responsible for the original images, nor for their accompanying text. For decades controversy has surrounded the true identity of the artist of the Aboriginal studies. Wantrup argues for the natural history illustrator John Lewin, attributing the stylistic differences between Lewin's known work and the plates in this volume to the conventions and discretionary modifications made by Clark and his engraver. He maintains that the artist must have experienced prolonged contact with the Aboriginal peoples of the Sydney region to produce studies of such detail, and through a process of elimination leaves Lewin as the only reasonable candidate. Nonetheless, Richard Neville, in his monograph on Lewin, disagrees with this attribution on the basis of stylistic and aesthetic considerations. Whoever the artist, this was "the first Australian coloured plate book properly so called, it is the first separate account of the Aborigines, and it is a fine book in its own right" (op. cit.). The ten plates would reappear in a later printing the following year as a supplement to the larger work Foreign Field Sports, a collection of 100 hunting scenes from cultures across the globe, including Africa, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. .…