Bird prints
Bird plates by eight naturalists, from Audubon’s life-size The Birds of America to Gould’s hummingbirds, Elliot’s pheasants and Levaillant’s parrots, first published between the 1740s and the 1880s. Each print is a facsimile giclée made from the originals, at the size of the original sheet, in a numbered edition of 250.
Scaup Duck
$185
Steller’s Duck
$185
Eider Duck
$185
King Duck
$185
Scoter
$185
Velvet Scoter
$185
Surf Scoter
$185
Golden-eye
$185
Harlequin Duck
$185
Long-tailed Duck
$185
Goosander
$185
Merganser
$185
Hooded Merganser
$185
Great Crested Grebe
$185
Red-necked Grebe
$185
Horned Grebe
$185
Eared Grebe
$185
Great Northern Diver
$185
Black-throated Diver
$185
Red-throated Diver
$185
Great Auk
$185
Razorbill
$185
Common Guillemot
$185
Black Guillemot
$185
Little Auk
$185
Puffin
$185
Cormorant
$185
Great Black-backed Gull
$185
Lesser Black-backed Gull
$185
Glaucous Gull
$185
Iceland Gull
$185
Herring Gull
$185
Common Gull
$185
Kittiwake
$185
Ivory Gull
$185
Ross’s Gull
$185
Black-headed Gull
$185
Bonaparte’s Gull
$185
Little Gull
$185
Sabine’s Gull
$185
Caspian Tern
$185
Sandwich Tern
$185
Common Tern
$185
Roseate Tern
$185
Arctic Tern
$185
Little Tern
$185
Gull-billed Tern
$185
Black Tern
$185
About bird prints
Our bird plates cover more than a century of printmaking, and the technique changes with the period. The oldest are copper engravings: Johann Michael Seligmann’s German versions of the birds of Mark Catesby and George Edwards, published in Nuremberg from 1749 (one of them shows a dodo beside a guinea pig), and Cornelius Nozeman’s Nederlandsche Vogelen, begun in 1770. Between 1801 and 1806 Jacques Barraband’s paintings of parrots and toucans for François Levaillant were engraved in stipple.
The largest sheets are Audubon’s: Robert Havell engraved and aquatinted The Birds of America in London between 1827 and 1838, opening with the Wild Turkey. Most of the other books are lithographs, among them those of John Gould, who worked with a team of artists, and the monographs of Daniel Giraud Elliot, drawn by Joseph Wolf, Joseph Smit and John Gerrard Keulemans. What is The Birds of America? tells how Audubon’s book was made.