[Habits of Religious Orders] A Collection of 282 original watercolour drawings of nuns and priests, with accompanying manuscript descriptions in English.

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282 hand coloured-plates - Manuscript descriptions No author known and not published. c1780 Five large quarto volumes. Volumes I-III contain 155 plates depicting priests; Volumes IV-V contain 127 plates depicting nuns. Each plate mounted on stiff card with a ruled border and accompanied by a leaf of manuscript description. Manuscript list of plates at the end of each volume. In modern full blue morocco, covers decoratively bordered in gilt, spines decoratively tooled and lettered in gilt in compartments, with a red morocco gilt lettering label, gilt board edges and turn ins, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers. Ink stamp of the Forbes Library, Northampton, Mass., on the verso of most plates. Armorial stamp of Henry Thomas Coghlan on the leaf in each volume. The watercolour drawings are after Filippo Buonanni's Ordinum religiosorum in ecclesia militanti catalogus, which was first published in Rome between 1706 and 1710, with the plates engraved by Arnold van Westerhout after designs by Andrea Orazi and showing both masculine and feminine orders. (274*231 mm). (Colas 370. Hiler p127).