Birds of paradise prints

Few Europeans had seen a living bird of paradise when Daniel Giraud Elliot published his monograph. Joseph Wolf drew the plates, Joseph Smit put them on stone, and J. D. White coloured them by hand, rendering the metallic sheen of the plumage. Elliot dedicated the book to Alfred Russel Wallace, who had watched the birds display in the wild, and covered the riflebirds, manucodes, bowerbirds and catbirds too, as well as Elliot’s Sicklebill, named after him. What is Elliot’s Birds of Paradise? tells how the book was made.

John Gould set his birds in animated compositions with full backgrounds. He completed twelve of the 25 parts of The Birds of New Guinea before his death, and Richard Bowdler Sharpe finished the work. One bird appears three times on this page: the six-plumed bird of paradise, in Elliot’s plate 9, in Gould’s plate 25, and as Le Sifilet, painted by Jacques Barraband for François Levaillant between 1801 and 1806.