Samuel Pepys’s hand-coloured copy of John Ray’s ‘The Ornithology of Francis Willughby’ (1678)

Abstract

We describe a unique, hand-coloured copy of Ray’s (1678) The Ornithology of Francis Willughby that was apparently presented to Samuel Pepys between 1684 and 1686 during his presidency of the Royal Society. Somehow, this volume was not catalogued as part of Pepys’s famous library, and fell into private hands until, in 1924, it was purchased for the McGill University Library in Montreal. More than 90% of the original engravings of birds in this volume are hand-coloured, making this a unique attempt to depict a large proportion of the known birds of the world in colour, and providing interesting insights into knowledge of bird colouration in the seventeenth century. The colouring of the 332 bird species on 76 hand-coloured plates is generally quite accurate—in the instances where the colouring is incorrect, it usually matches the description in Ray’s text almost exactly.