(London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909).

LIMITED FIRST ISSUE AND FIRST EDITION OF THIS SUPERB WORK ON THE GAME BIRDS OF GREAT BRITAIN. The illustrations are stunning and the condition of the plates and text is superb. Millais' great work, was renown at the time of publication and still a century later thought to be one of the greatest of all works on the subject. The bird groups included in the work with chapters devoted to each and multiple plates, include the Capercaillie, the Black Grouse, the Red Grouse, the Common Ptarmigan, the Common Pheasant, the Chinese Pheasant, Hagenbeck's Pheasant, the Mongolian Pheasant, the Prince of Wales's Pheasant the Japanese Pheasant, Reeves's Pheasant, the Common Partridge, the Red-Legged Partridges and the Quail. The colourplates are brilliantly coloured, the photogravures are exquisite. A sumptuous work by one of Britain's most revered ornithological artists.
John Guille Millais, British artist, naturalist, gardener and travel writer specialized in wildlife and flower portraiture. He traveled extensively around the world in the late Victorian period detailing wildlife often for the first time. He is noted for illustrations that are of a particularly exact nature. He was the fourth son and seventh child of Sir John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painter. His was clearly a wanderlust based on a desire to see, record and paint the natural world. To this end he traveled widely in Europe, Africa and North America. In the New World in the 1880s/90s he explored Canada and Newfoundland and helped map uncharted areas of Alaska.
Millais is one of the most respected of British ornithologists and bird artists, producing between 1890 and 1914 a series of books on birds and other natural history subjects. In the study of ornithology he was renowned for his portraiture of wildfowl and game birds, the subjects of his three most famous works: Natural History of British Feeding Ducks; British Diving Ducks and British Game Birds. They rank amongst the finest work on wildfowl ever published. Each bird receives individual treatment in text and detailed chromolithographs, some of which are by his friend and pre-eminent bird artist of the day Archibald Thorburn (1860–1935). Each species is represented by two or three individuals on a plate drawn in attitudes of feeding, resting and courtship.
The books are lavish and with just 400 to 600 original editions published are now prized as examples of a certain type of High Victorian grandeur. Millais' skills are essentially Victorian, as private wealth allowed him to indulge his passions on a grand scale. He was undoubtedly tenacious. His son Raoul spoke of him as an "astonishing man and his power of concentration was such that once he took up a subject he never left it until he knew more about it than anyone in the World".
. Item #34639

First Edition, One of 550 Copies Only. Illustrated with 18 coloured plates, 17 photogravures and 2 other illustrations by Archibald Thorburn and J.G. Millais, with all single and double tissue guards in place as issued. Folio, publisher's original burgundy polished buckram over burgundy cloth, gilt ruled at the joins, lettered in gilt on the spine and on the upper cover. xi, [1], 142. [1 ads.], [1] pp. + plates A fine copy, the plates and text-block in superb condition, the spine panel mellowed by light.