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 Oriole
$185
Clouded Thrush
$185
Red-throated Thrush
$185
Gould’s Thrush
$185
Afghan Thrush
$185
Chestnut-coloured Merula
$185
White-collared Merula
$185
Grey-winged Merula
$185
Chestnut-bellied Rock-Thrush
$185
Crested Spizixos
$185
Chinese Spizixos
$185
Blue-bellied Tesia
$185
Chesnut-crowned Tesia
$185
Chinese Rhopophilus
$185
Little Suya
$185
White-throated Dumetia
$185
Buff-throated Dumetia
$185
Grey-headed Staphida
$185
Red-eyed Stachryris
$185
White-tailed Bush Chat
$185
Mountain Accentor
$185
Desert White-throat
$185
Adams’s Mountain Finch
$185
Northern Mountain Finch
$185
Red-rumped Mountain Finch
$185
Brown-naped Mountain Finch
$185
Red-necked Mountain Finch
$185
Grey-capped Bunting
$185
Dwarf Bunting
$185
Cinereous Bunting
$185
Painted Bunting
$185
Rustic Bunting
$185
Hutton’s Bunting
$185
Elegant Bunting
$185
Black-headed Bunting
$185
Red-headed Bunting
$185
Turkestan Sparrow
$185
Burton’s Grosbeak
$185
Formosan Blue Pie
$185
Nepaulese Blue Pie
$185
Chinese Blue Pie
$185
Great-billed Blue Pie
$185
Yellow billed Blue Pie
$185
White capped Blue Pie
$185
White-winged Magpie
$185
Affgahn Magpie
$185
Bootan Magpie
$185
Collared Wood-Pigeon
$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.