LONDON.- Eleven watercolour paintings once in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle are to be offered at Bonhams Old master Paintings Sale in London on Wednesday 3 December. They will be sold individually and have a combined upper estimate of £65,000.

The paintings are from the Paper Museum – Museo Cartaceo in Italian - assembled by the 17th century Roman intellectual, Cassiano dal Pozzo, a friend of Galileo and patron to the French Classical painter Nicolas Poussin. Dal Pozzo commissioned over 7,000 watercolours of natural history and archaeology painted from first had observation by some of the leading painters of the day. Each sheet of the Paper Museum was numbered and bound in volumes which in time passed from the dal Pozzo family to Pope Clement XI until they ended up in the collection of King George III in 1762. In the 1780s at the newly established Royal Bindery in Buckingham House (later Palace) some of the volumes were rebound and some of the watercolours, including the ones in the sale, were remounted. The books eventually found a permanent home in the Royal Library at Windsor.

Early in the 20th century, a number of volumes of the Paper Museum were sold by the then Librarian at Windsor, Sir John Fortescue, to raise funds for the Library’s upkeep. Many years later, by complete chance, these eleven watercolours were discovered in an antique shop by Sir John’s successor as Librarian, Major Sir Owen Morshead. Sir Owen, a much decorated war hero from the Great War where he served with the Prince of Wales, was the Librarian at Windsor from 1926-1858. He played a key role in reorganizing the Library along rational lines bringing in Kenneth Clark, for example, to catalogue the six hundred drawings by Leonardo da Vinci for the first time.

The eleven paintings are made up of ten studies of birds and one of a fish and include a magnificent Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (£7,000-9,000), a Short-eared Owl (£6,000-8,000) and a Paradise Whydah (£3,500-4,500).

Bonhams Director of Old Master Paintings, Andrew Mckenzie, said: “The Museo Cartaceo was one of the crowing achievements of Rome in the Baroque era and is one of the most remarkable collections of natural history and archaeological paintings ever created. It is a tribute to the restless spirit of enquiry into all branches of knowledge which characterised the time.”