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.
Red-naped Falcon
$185
Saker Falcon
$185
Lanner Falcon
$185
Jugger Falcon
$185
White-winged Red-footed Kestrel
$185
Rufous-breasted Spilornis
$185
Black-and-white Crested Eagle
$185
Govinda Kite
$185
Celebean Elanus
$185
Indian Scops Owl
$185
Bay Owl
$185
Brodie’s Owlet
$185
Speckled Wood-Owl
$185
Indian Screech Owl
$185
Grass Owl
$185
Mahratta Nightjar
$185
Palm Roof-Swift
$185
Crested Tree-Swift
$185
Klecho Tree-Swift
$185
Wallace’s Tree-Swift
$185
Bearded Tree-Swift
$185
Hooded Tree-Swift
$185
Wire-tailed Swallow
$185
Western Mosque-Swallow
$185
Daurian Mosque-Swallow
$185
Indian Mosque-Swallow
$185
Ceylonese Mosque-Swallow
$185
Nepal Martin-Swallow
$185
Bungalow Swallow
$185
Indian Cliff-Swallow
$185
Hurrial Bee-eater
$185
Philippine Bee-eater
$185
Blue-throated Nyctiornis
$185
Red-throated Nyctiornis
$185
Forsten’s Bee-eater
$185
Lindsay’s Kingfisher
$185
Sumatra Kingfisher
$185
Indian Kingfisher
$185
Manilla Kingfisher
$185
Black-capped Kingfisher
$185
Black-and-white Kingfisher
$185
Many-coloured Kingfisher
$185
Banded Kingfisher
$185
Black-faced Kingfisher
$185
Tenasserim Kingfisher
$185
Mantled Kingfisher
$185
Great Alcedo
$185
Indian Kingfisher
$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.