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
Little Gull
$185
Sabine’s Gull
$185
Caspian Tern
$185
Sandwich Tern
$185
Common Tern
$185
Roseate Tern
$185
Arctic Tern
$185
Little Tern
$185
Gull-billed Tern
$185
Black Tern
$185
White-winged Tern
$185
Whiskered Tern
$185
Great Skua
$185
Pomatorhine Skua
$185
Arctic Skua
$185
Long-tailed Skua
$185
Fulmar
$185
Great Shearwater
$185
Manx Shearwater
$185
Forked-tailed Storm-Petrel
$185
Storm-Petrel
$185
Black-mantled Goshawk
$185
Marquis Doria’s Goshawk
$185
New-Guinea Harpy-Eagle
$185
Gurney’s Cuckoo-Falcon
$185
New Britain Hawk-Owl
$185
Forbes Hawk-Owl
$185
Salvadori’s Hawk-Owl
$185
New Guinea – Elliot’s Promerops
$185
Great Promerops
$185
Bennet’s Bird of Paradise
$185
D’Albertis Bird of Paradise
$185
Bruijn’s Bird of Paradise
$185
New-Guinea Rifle-Bird
$185
Twelve-wired Bird of Paradise
$185
Wattled Bird of Paradise
$185
Gorget Paradise Bird
$185
Superb Bird of Paradise
$185
Lesser Superb Bird of Paradise
$185
Bare-headed Bird of Paradise
$185
Waigiou Bird of Paradise
$185
Magnificent Bird of Paradise
$185
Golden-winged Bird of Paradise
$185
King Bird of Paradise
$185
Six-plumed Bird of Paradise
$185
Lawes’s Bird of Paradise
$185
Grey-chested Bird of Paradise
$185
Papuan Bird of Paradise
$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.