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.
Amaura Hermit
$185
Green-tailed Hermit
$185
Southern Hermit
$185
Adolph’s Hermit
$185
Grey-throated Hermit
$185
Stripe-throated Hermit
$185
Obscure Hermit
$185
Belted Hermit
$185
Little Hermit
$185
Pygmy Hermit
$185
Swallow tail
$185
Wedgetailed Sabrewing
$185
Lazuline Sabrewing
$185
De Lattre’s Sabrewing
$185
Blue-Throated Sabrewing
$185
Villavicencio’s Sabrewing
$185
Broad-shafted Sabrewing
$185
Sombre Sabrewing
$185
Fawn-breasted Sabrewing
$185
Rufous-breasted Sabrewing (1)
$185
Cuvier’s Sabrewing
$185
Owen’s Sabrewing
$185
Sombre Hummingbird
$185
Buff-breasted Leucippus
$185
Pied-tail
$185
Bluebreast
$185
The Rivoli
$185
Blue-Throated Cazique
$185
De Rham’s Garnet
$185
Henry De Lattre’s Cazique
$185
Rufous-breasted Sabrewing (2)
$185
Blackeared Hummingbird
$185
Crimson Topaz
$185
Fiery Topaz
$185
Chimborazian Hillstar
$185
Pichinchian Hillstar
$185
Estella’s Hillstar
$185
White-sided Hillstar
$185
Black-breasted Hillstar
$185
Adela’s Hillstar
$185
The Mango
$185
Prevost’s Mango
$185
Veraguan Mango
$185
Green-throated Mango
$185
Blue-tailed Mango
$185
Domingo Mango
$185
St. Thomas’s Mango
$185
Porphyry-tailed Mango
$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.