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
Indian Wryneck
$185
Great Northern Diver or Loon
$725
Javan Spotted Woodpecker
$185
Blue Crane or Heron
$475
Lerwa Partridge
$185
Tell-tale Godwit or Snipe
$350
Malacca Parrakeet
$185
Great Tern
$350
Malayan Piculet
$185
Spotted Sandpiper
$350
Malayan Pygmy Woodpecker
$185
Long-tailed Duck
$475
Maroon-breasted Pigeon
$185
Blue-winged Teal
$350
Mongolian Rock-Pigeon
$185
Black-headed Gull
$350
Mrs. Layard’s Parakeet
$185
Read-breasted Sandpiper
$350
Negros Yellow-faced Woodpecker
$185
Black-bellied Darter
$725
Nicobar Parrakeet
$185
Black or Surf Duck
$475
Orange-breasted Pygmy Woodpecker
$185
American Avocet
$350
Otidiphaps
$185
Lesser Tern
$350
Painted Spur-Fowl
$185
Little Sandpiper
$350
Pallas’s Sand-Grouse
$185
Red-headed Duck
$350
Philippine Racket-tailed Parrot
$185
Black Skimmer or Shearwater
$350
Powerful Cuckoo
$185
Bonapartian Gull
$350
Racket-tailed Parrot
$185
Buffet-headed Duck
$350
Ramsay’s Pygmy Woodpecker
$185
Gannet
$725
Red-breasted Pigeon
$185
Shoveler Duck
$475
Rufous Piculet
$185
Long-tailed Avocet
$350
Rufous Spur-Fowl
$185
Yellow-breasted Rail
$350
Rufous-bellied Cuckoo
$185
Ring Plover
$350
Rufous-breasted Bamboo-Partridge
$185
Goosander
$725
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.