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
Black-breasted Hillstar
$185
Adela’s Hillstar
$185
The Mango
$185
Prevost’s Mango
$185
Veraguan Mango
$185
Green-throated Mango
$185
Blue-tailed Mango
$185
Domingo Mango
$185
St. Thomas’s Mango
$185
Porphyry-tailed Mango
$185
Purple-breasted Carib
$185
Green-breasted Carib
$185
Grass-green-breasted Carib
$185
Buff-tailed Velvet-breast
$185
White-tailed Velvet-breast
$185
Blue-fronted Lancebill
$185
Green-fronted Lancebill
$185
Buffon’s Plumeleteer
$185
Golden-tailed Plumeleteer
$185
Blue-breasted Plumeleteer
$185
Emerald-fronted Hummingbird
$185
Schreibers’ Hummingbird
$185
Green-crowned Brilliant
$185
Jameson’s Brilliant
$185
Otera Brilliant
$185
Leadbeater’s Brilliant
$185
Black-capped Hummingbird
$185
Brazilian Wood Nymph
$185
Waterton’s Wood Nymph
$185
Cayenne Wood Nymph
$185
Refulgent Wood Nymph
$185
Tschudi’s Wood Nymph
$185
Black-banded Wood Nymph
$185
Veraguan Wood Nymph
$185
Columbian Wood Nymph
$185
Green-crowned Wood Nymph
$185
Brazilian Wood Nymph
$185
Wagler’s Wood Nymph
$185
Jardine’s Panoplites
$185
Yellow-fronted Panoplites
$185
Matthews’ Panoplites
$185
Jacobin
$185
Great Jacobin
$185
Pied Jacobin
$185
Snow-cap
$185
Tufted Coquette
$185
Gould’s Coquette
$185
Frilled Coquette
$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.