Featured on PDR in the collection A Wetted Beak: Engravings from Pauline Knip’s Les Pigeons (1811)

We don’t tend to imagine pigeons, those scruffy grey denizens of urban centres, as worthy of serious aesthetic appreciation. The familiar feral birds have a large taxonomic family, however, whose members are often elegant and beautiful. Consider the filigreed blue mohawk of the Victoria pigeon, or the ruby-laden breast of the bleeding-heart dove. The diversity and appeal of the bird was well known to Pauline Knip (1781–1851), née Rifer de Courcelles, who produced beautiful watercolour illustrations of more than eighty members of the Columbidae family for Les Pigeons (1811) — a work whose publication history is mired in controversy.