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.
Swinhoe’s Pygmy Woodpecker
$185
Temminck’s Pygmy Woodpecker
$185
The Earl of Derby’s Parrakeet
$185
Thibet Partridge
$185
Tibetian Short-toed Sand-Grouse
$185
Travancore Pygmy Woodpecker
$185
Vigors’s Pygmy Woodpecker
$185
White-bellied Pigeon
$185
Yellow-naped Woodpecker
$185
Yellow-rumped Honey-guide
$185
Blossom-headed Parrakeet
$185
Burmese Parrakeet
$185
Bonaparte’s Parrakeet
$185
Blue-winged Parrakeet
$185
Allied Parrakeet
$185
Little Racket-tailed Parrot
$185
Chinese Spotted Woodpecker
$185
Banded Pygmy Woodpecker
$185
Ceylonese Pygmy Woodpecker
$185
Hairy-browed Cuckoo
$185
Amethystine Cuckoo
$185
Branded Pigeon
$185
Whistling Sand-Grouse
$185
Banded Sand-Grouse
$185
Ceylon Spur-Fowl
$185
Bearded Partridge
$185
Black-bellied Tern
$185
Black-winged Pratincole
$185
Chinese Jacana
$185
Chinese Pucras Pheasant
$185
Chinese Quail
$185
Chinese Ring-necked Pheasant
$185
Cinereous Pratincole
$185
Coromandel Quail
$185
Darwin’s Pucras Pheasant
$185
De l’Huys’ Monal
$185
Dr. Cabot’s Horned Pheasant
$185
Elliot’s Pheasant
$185
Fasciated Hemipode
$185
Geoffroy’s Francolin
$185
Golden Pheasant
$185
Hey’s Sand Partridge
$185
Himalayan Pucras Pheasant
$185
Himalayan Snow-Partridge
$185
Indian Courser
$185
Japanese Pheasant
$185
Kafiristan Pucras Pheasant
$185
Kurile Guillemot
$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.