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
Great-crested Coquette
$185
De Lattres’s Coquette
$185
Spangled Coquette
$185
Festive Coquette
$185
Peruvian Coquette
$185
Racket-tail
$185
Popelaires Thorn-tail
$185
Langsdorff’s Thorn-tail
$185
Convers’ Thorn-tail
$185
Letitia
$185
Ruby-throated Hummingbird
$185
Purple-throated Hummingbird
$185
Little Hummingbird
$185
Costa’s Calypte
$185
Anna’s Calypte
$185
Helena’s Calypte
$185
Rufous Flamebearer
$185
Little Flamebearer
$185
Floresi’s Flamebearer
$185
Broad-tailed Flamebearer
$185
Heloisa’s Flamebearer
$185
Mexican Satellite
$185
Mexican Star
$185
Beautiful Woodstar
$185
Mulsant’s Woodstar
$185
Decorated Woodstar
$185
Heliodore’s Woodstar
$185
Short-tailed Woodstar
$185
Crimson-throated Woodstar
$185
Jourdan’s Woodstar
$185
Fanny’s Woodstar
$185
Yarrell’s Woodstar
$185
Cora’s Sheartail
$185
Evening Hummingbird
$185
Mexican Sheartail
$185
Bahama Woodstar
$185
Slender Sheartail
$185
Sparklingtail
$185
The Amethyst
$185
Mitchell’s Amethyst
$185
Marvellous Hummingbird
$185
White-booted Rackettail
$185
Ecuadorian Rackettail
$185
Peruvian Rackettail
$185
Red-booted Rackettail
$185
Scissor-tailed Rackettail
$185
Bogota Trainbearer
$185
Graceful Trainbearer
$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.