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.
2,174 prints
White-winged Magpie
$185
White-winged silvery Gull
$475
Affgahn Magpie
$185
Wandering Shearwater
$350
Bootan Magpie
$185
Purple Sandpiper
$350
Collared Wood-Pigeon
$185
Fork-tailed Gull
$350
Coronetted Sand-Grouse
$185
White-fronted Goose
$725
Crimson-breasted Partridge
$185
Ivory Gull
$475
Curl-crested Cuckoo
$185
Yellow Shank
$350
Darjiling Pygmy Woodpecker
$185
Solitary Sandpiper
$350
Doerries’s Pygmy Woodpecker
$185
Red backed Sandpiper
$350
Elphinstone’s Wood-Pigeon
$185
Herring Gull
$725
Embroidered Barbet
$185
Crested Grebe
$475
Emerald Cuckoo
$185
Large Billed Puffin
$475
Formosan Bamboo-Partridge
$185
Pectoral Sandpiper
$350
Formosan Green Woodpecker
$185
Manks Shearwater
$350
Formosan Spotted Woodpecker
$185
Barnacle Goose
$725
Franklin’s Barbet
$185
Harlequin Duck
$475
Georgian Black Grouse
$185
Red-necked Grebe
$350
Great Racket-tailed Parrot
$185
Dusky Petrel
$350
Grey-headed Parrakeet
$185
Golden Plover
$350
Grey-headed Pygmy Woodpecker
$185
Canvas backed Duck
$725
Hardwicke’s Pygmy Woodpecker
$185
Dusky Duck
$475
Hartlaub’s Spotted Woodpecker
$185
Bartram Sandpiper
$350
Heart-spotted Woodpecker
$185
Turn-Stone
$350
Indian Rock-Pigeon
$185
Purple Gallinule
$350
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.