Perhaps through the influence of his father, the botanical artist John Sebastian Miller (1715–92) (born Johan Sebastian Müller), from 1772 John Frederick Miller was one of the favoured natural history illustrators of Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820). Miller had been among the artists selected to join Banks on his planned return to the Pacific with James Cook’s second voyage (1772–5) but when the botanist withdrew, the party was replaced by the father-son pairing of Johann Reinhold and Georg Forster. Banks instead decided to travel to the Outer Hebrides and Iceland and brought Miller along with him to illustrate the flora and fauna he encountered in the region. On their return to London, Miller provided the plates for Banks’s published account of the voyage. Others were later used by Thomas Pennant to embellish his 1784-7 work Arctic Zoology.
Between 1776 and 1785, Miller began to issue, by subscription, coloured plates of birds, mammals, reptiles and plants. Published in ten parts of six plates with each part accompanied by a sheet of binomials, the Icones Animalium et Plantarum, is an incredibly rare work. A 1921 survey of the bird species by C. Davies Sherburn and Tom Iredale (‘J. F. Miller’s Icones’, The Ibis, series 11 vol. 3, pp. 302–30) noted only two known copies: one formerly belonging to Sir Wilfrid Lawson (1764–1806), now in the Natural History Museum and Sir Joseph Banks’s copy held in the British Museum (now the British Library). Of those two, Lawson’s was the most complete with 54 surviving plates, though Banks’s was the one likely used by nineteenth-century ornithologists to identify species. Other copies have since been identified in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (containing 47 plates) and the Staatsbibliothek Berlin (37 plates).
The Royal Library’s copy, the third known copy in the United Kingdom, contains 59 of the plates, with only plate XXII (spoonbill) wanting. It was likely acquired by William IV and bears his cypher on the spine. Any earlier provenance, if there was any, was seemingly removed when the book was re-bound in the 1830s. Evidence from foxing of the pages of descriptive text shows that the book was originally arranged in order, with the plates following the sheet of names, but when re-bound the plates took priority with the binomial sheets placed together at the back of the volume.

None of the surviving copies have a title page (if one was printed) meaning the title by which Miller’s work is now known comes from Robert Watt’s 1824 Bibliotheca Britannica, with its English subtitle (Various subjects in natural history, wherein are delineated Birds, Animals, and many curious plants) recreated from evidence in other later bibliographic catalogues.
The plates contain numerous species of which the depiction and the binomial serves as the holotype. These include the king penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus), crested caracara (Caracara plancus), secretary bird (Sagittarius serpentarius), lesser florican (Sypheotides indica) and the green wood-hoopoe (Phoeniculus purpureus).
It seems that many of the species included in Icones were drawn from specimens found in Banks’s large collection at his home on Soho Square, as well as those found in the Leverian Museum in nearby Leicester Square and from drawings made on the spot by fellow naturalists such as Georg Forster.
Miller probably did all of the work himself: etching, printing and hand-colouring each image. He may have worked in haste as the plates varied across the parts, with text missing from the copperplate often being added by hand at a later date. Some plates also contain evidence of errant brush strokes, dirty plate marks and inky fingerprints that the artist would have wished to have been avoided.
In 1796, a second edition, retitled Cimelia physica (see RCIN 1083421) and perhaps making use of Miller's unsold stock, was published with descriptive text by George Shaw. Shaw, a noted populariser of natural history to an audience increasingly interested by the exotic plants and animals being encountered around the world, changed several of Miller’s binomials and some of the plates were re-etched to incorporate missing elements. The colouring in the later work is also often different to that found in the original, perhaps a result of overpainting or retouching.