This wonderful watercolor is a dramatic portrait of a bird of prey known as the common buzzard, but there is nothing common about this avian artwork. It is a watercolor by British naturalist William Lewin (1747–1795) and is an illustration from his The Birds of Great Britain, with Their Eggs, Accurately Figured.
Lewin began to issue the book in 1789, the result of twenty years of work and research. Limited to a subscription of 60, each volume of the first edition contained 323 watercolors of birds and their eggs. Lewin, a meticulous and skilled artist, painted each illustration for the entire first edition, a total of 19,380 individual paintings.
Therefore this magnificent bird is one of original flock of 60. One wonders how many survived over the past 230 years.
The book was so popular, Lewin, assisted by his three sons, began work on a second edition, this time using hand-colored etchings inscribed by Lewin. This allowed a larger printing of 150 copies, which were issued in eight volumes from 1793 to 1801. Lewin died in 1795, having engraved the plates for volumes one to three and his sons completed the illustrations for the remaining volumes.
Sadly, because of the beauty of its watercolors, the first editions were broken up by collectors and dealers for the individual illustrations, many of which have been lost or destroyed over time. The second edition also suffered similar poaching of its beautiful bird illustrations and less than 30 complete examples are known to exist.
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