🔥Fine Antique 19th c. Hummingbird Nature Lithograph

Description: This is a beautiful and Important Fine Antique 19th c. Hummingbird Nature Lithograph on paper, Hand-Colored, after the renowned Ornithologist and Naturalist watercolor painter, John Gould (1804 - 1881,) from his highly regarded treatise, the Monograph of Trochilidae or Family of Humming Birds (1849 - 1861.) Gould was a friend and close associate of Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882,) during the former's time exploring the Galapagos Islands, and documenting the various flora and fauna there. This piece depicts two beautiful and effervescent hummingbirds, surrounded by gorgeously detailed flora, including various cacti and flowers. This artwork is typographically signed and annotated at the lower edge: "J. Gould and H.C. Richter, del. et lith. SPATHURA SCISSIURA, Gould. Hullmandel & Walton, Imp." Additionally, an old, yellowed label at the top right edge reads: "John Gould. Scissor-Tailed Racket Tail. 20 x 13. c. 1860. Hand-Colored Lithograph." Included with this artwork is the original 19th century introductory page for this lithograph, tucked into a custom-made sleeve affixed to the verso of the frame (Photo 24.) Approximately 21 3/8 x 28 1/8 inches (including frame.) Actual artwork is approximately 13 x 20 inches. Very good condition for well over a century of age, with moderate scratches and edge wear to the vintage frame, light speckles of age-related foxing to the matting, and light debris under the glass. Additionally, the glass is slightly loose toward the top edge of the frame (please see photos.) Acquired in Los Angeles County, California. Priced to Sell. If you like what you see, I encourage you to make an Offer. Please check out my other listings for more wonderful and unique artworks! About the Artist: John Gould Born: 1804 - Lyme Regis, Dorset, EnglandDied: 1881 - Bedford Square, London, EnglandKnown for: Ornithology illustration-hummingbirds John Gould (1804 - 1881) was active/lived in England, Australia. John Gould is known for Ornithology illustration-hummingbirds. 19th-century British artist John Gould enjoyed a prolific publishing career that lasted over half a century and oversaw the issuance of more than a dozen folios examining birds from all over the world. Gould recruited the talents of natural history illustrators including Edward Lear in order to create his luscious folios. Among Gould’s best-known folios are the monumental Family of Humming Birds, Birds of Europe, Birds of Great Britain, and the Family of Toucans. John Gould was an English ornithologist and bird artist. The Gould League in Australia was named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed "Darwin's finches" played a role in the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Gould's work is referenced in Charles Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species.Gould was born in Lyme Regis, Dorset, the son of a gardener, and the boy probably had a scanty education. Shortly afterwards his father obtained a position on an estate near Guildford, Surrey, and then in 1818 became foreman in the Royal Gardens of Windsor. He was for some time under the care of J T Aiton, of the Royal Gardens of Windsor. The young Gould started training as a gardener, being employed under his father at Windsor from 1818 to 1824, and he was subsequently a gardener at Ripley Castle in Yorkshire. He became an expert in the art of taxidermy, and in 1824 he set himself up in business in London as a taxidermist, and his skill led to him becoming the first Curator and Preserver at the museum of the Zoological Society of London in 1827.Gould's position brought him into contact with the country's leading naturalists, and also meant that he was often the first to see new collections of birds given to the Society. In 1830 a collection of birds arrived from the Himalayas, many not previously described. Gould published these birds in A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains (1830-1832). The text was by Nicholas Aylward Vigors, and the illustrations were lithographed by Gould's wife Elizabeth, daughter of Nicholas Coxen of Kent.This work was followed by four more in the next seven years including Birds of Europe in five volumes - completed in 1837, with the text written by Gould himself, edited by his clerk Edwin Prince. Some of the illustrations were made by Edward Lear as part of his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae in 1832. Lear however was in financial difficulty, and he sold the entire set of lithographs to Gould. The books were published in a very large size, imperial folio, with magnificent coloured plates. Eventually 41 of these volumes were published with about 3000 plates. They appeared in parts at £3 3s. a number, subscribed for in advance, and in spite of the heavy expense of preparing the plates, Gould succeeded in making his ventures pay and in realizing a fortune. In 1838 he and his wife moved to Australia to work on the Birds of Australia and shortly after his return to England, his wife died in 1841.When Charles Darwin presented his mammal and bird specimens collected during the second voyage of HMS Beagle to the Geological Society of London at their meeting on 4 January 1837, the bird specimens were given to Gould for identification. He set aside his paying work and at the next meeting on 10 January reported that birds from the Galápagos Islands, which Darwin had thought were blackbirds, "gross-bills" and finches were in fact "a series of ground Finches which are so peculiar" as to form "an entirely new group, containing 12 species." This story made the newspapers.In March, Darwin met Gould again, learning that his Galápagos "wren" was another species of finch and the mockingbirds he had labeled by island were separate species rather than just varieties, with relatives on the South American mainland. Subsequently Gould advised that the smaller southern Rhea specimen that had been rescued from a Christmas dinner was a separate species which he named Rhea darwinii, whose territory overlapped with the northern rheas.Darwin had not bothered to label his finches by island, but others on the expedition had taken more care. He now sought specimens collected by captain Robert FitzRoy and crewmen. From them he was able to establish that the species were unique to islands, an important step on the inception of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Gould's work on the birds was published between 1838 and 1842 in five numbers as Part 3 of Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, edited by Charles Darwin.In 1838 the Goulds sailed to Australia intending to study the birds of that country and be the first to produce a major work on the subject. They took with them the collector John Gilbert. They arrived in Tasmania in September, making the acquaintance of the governor Sir John Franklin and his wife. Gould and Gilbert collected on the island.In February 1839 Gould sailed to Sydney, leaving his pregnant wife with the Franklins. He travelled to his brother-in-law's station at Yarrundi, spending his time searching for bowerbirds in the Liverpool Range. In April he returned to Tasmania for the birth of his son. In May he sailed to Adelaide to meet Charles Sturt, who was preparing to lead an expedition to the Murray River. Gould collected in the Mount Lofty range, the Murray Scrubs and Kangaroo Island, returning again to Hobart in July. He then travelled with his wife to Yarrundi. They returned home to England in May 1840.The result of the trip was The Birds of Australia (1840-1848). It included a total of 600 plates in seven volumes, 328 of which were new to science and named by Gould. He also published A Monograph of the Macropodidae, or Family of Kangaroos (1841-1842) and the three volume work The Mammals of Australia (1849-1861).Elizabeth died in 1841, and Gould's books subsequently used illustrations by a number of artists, including Henry Constantine Richter, William Matthew Hart and Joseph Wolf. Throughout his professional life Gould had a strong interest in hummingbirds. He accumulated a collection of 320 species, which he exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Despite his interest Gould had never seen a live hummingbird.In May 1857 he travelled to the United States with his second son Charles. He arrived in New York too early in the season to see hummingbirds in that city, but on 21 May 1857 in Bartram's Gardens in Philadelphia he finally saw his first live bird, a Ruby-throated Hummingbird. He then continued to Washington D.C. where he saw large numbers in the gardens of the Capitol. Gould attempted to return to England with live specimens, but not being aware of the conditions necessary to keep them they only lived for two months at most.Gould published: A Monograph of the Trochilidae or Humming Birds with 360 plates (1849-61); The Mammals of Australia (1845-63), Handbook to the Birds of Australia (1865), The Birds of Asia (1850-83), The Birds of Great Britain (1862-73) and The Birds of New Guinea and the adjacent Papuan Islands (1875-88).A visit to Gould in his old age provided the inspiration for John Everett Millais' painting The Ruling Passion.The Gould League, founded in Australia in 1909, was named after him. This organization gave many Australians their first introduction to birds, along with more general environmental and ecological education. One of its major sponsors was the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union, also known as Birds Australia.In 1976 he was honoured on a postage stamp bearing his portrait issued by Australia Post.His son Charles Gould was notable as geological surveyor. Biography from Cheryl Newby GalleryJohn Gould was a prolific illustrator of ornithology and was noted for the beauty of his illustrations. During his lifetime he was responsible for the illustration of over 2,200 different species of birds from around the world.The work for which he is best known is his Monograph of the Trochilidae or the "Family of Hummingbirds", which was produced between 1849-1861. Each hand-colored lithograph, many of which are highlighted with shimmering iridescence, presents the tiny jewel-like birds visiting lush flowers and foliage. Bird Artist John Gould and the Man Who Lost a Fortune Collecting HimThe story of an entrepreneurial artist and an avid book collector About the authorSteve Moyer is managing editor of Humanities. (2014) Bird artist John Gould captured the essence of his avian subjects with quick, bold lines, but his great success was due to more than a good drawing hand. Just as important was his manner of production, which yielded an incredible fifty oversized volumes between 1830 and 1881. First, Gould would make a rough sketch, jotting notes on the manuscript as to how to fill out the picture and which colors to add, then pass the image on to other artists and colorists, including his wife, Elizabeth, and Edward Lear, who provided the finishing touches. His beautiful drawings assured his popularity among a wealthy clientele, while the reliable scientific information in his tomes made for a wider commercial success. Born in Dorset in 1804, Gould became adept as a child at egg-blowing and taxidermy. He would collect natural specimens and bird eggs and sell the treasures to boys at Eton. By the time he was twenty, Gould was capitalizing on the booming trade and interest in taxidermy, which soon led to an appointment as curator and preserver to the Zoological Society of London’s museum. The job came with a salary of one hundred pounds, a hefty income for a young man at the time.In 1829, Gould married Elizabeth Coxen, a well-bred governess. She had a solid grounding in music, art, and languages. As the Goulds began raising a family, Elizabeth helped her husband with drawings of birds.The first work Gould and Elizabeth collaborated on was the massive A Century of Birds fromthe Himalaya Mountains, which was issued in parts between 1830 and 1833. Gould’s albums were in imperial folio format (22 inches by 15 inches). The couple’s diligent toil was also a learning experience, one in which Elizabeth acquired, through Lear, the techniques needed for drawing birds on stone printing plates. The Goulds voyaged to Australia from 1838 to 1840 and worked on their last joint book, The Birds of Australia. The next year, Elizabeth died of puerperal fever following childbirth, leaving six children.The Victorians’ appetite for books and for collecting specimens from the natural world fed the frenetic activity in what has been called the Gould factory. More than an artist, Gould was a consummate entrepreneur.But Gould was a man of his age as well. By the end of the hummingbird craze, which started in England in 1851 at the Crystal Palace in London during the Great Exhibition, he had well over five thousand hummingbird skins in his personal collection. It’s no wonder the bird-loving English were enchanted: The country had no native hummingbirds. Gould wrote about them with admiration after having seen some for the first time in America: “With what delight did I examine its tiny body and feast my eyes on its glittering plumage.”Gould made solid contributions to science as well. He helped identify species in the collection of four hundred fifty birds that Charles Darwin presented to the museum of the Zoological Society in 1837. This identification played a significant role in developing the theory of evolution. With Gould’s help, Darwin was able to demonstrate that species of birds on the Galápagos Islands were similar to those specimens collected in South America, which led to the concept of divergent evolution, whereby isolated populations can become new species. In addition to aiding Darwin, Gould wrote more than three hundred scientific articles.A digitization project at the University of Kansas has been making the Gould collection available online. The unlikely series of coincidences that led to Gould’s manuscripts winding up in Lawrence, Kansas, has the makings of a poignant yet cautionary modern fairy tale.A young, sickly boy born in 1908 to a wealthy Long Island family became fascinated with natural history, and by age twelve he was collecting birds’ eggs and nests. He moved with his mother to Berkeley, California, in the early 1920s, and there some zoologists guided him in his interests on field trips. After another bout of illness ended his fieldwork, he nurtured, as an adult, an obsessive desire to collect books on birds. According to special collections librarian Karen Cook, the man, Ralph Nicholson Ellis Jr., already in financial straits due to his furious pace of book buying, traveled to England when he heard that the Gould collection was up for sale. There, in 1936 and 1937, he racked up bills for books he bought from the collection to the tune of $63,000. InA GentleMadness, Nicholas Basbanes describes Ellis’s collecting as a case of “galloping bibliomania,” which by 1940 had gotten so out of hand his mother had him committed briefly to a sanitarium lest his purchases wipe out the family fortune.Some inheritance money allowed Ellis to buy even more books he could ill afford. While moving cross country from California in 1945, the 65,000-item collection made the trip in two railway freight cars. Ellis, who was in New York awaiting the collection, diverted it to Kansas when a friend, the head of the Museum of Natural History in Lawrence, offered him storage space, an office, and the opportunity to catalog his collection. Ellis recognized this as a chance for a new start and accepted but died six months later of pneumonia. To the University of Kansas, he bequeathed the collection, which after some years found its permanent roost in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library.

Price: 975 USD

Location: Orange, California

End Time: 2025-01-10T02:05:28.000Z

Shipping Cost: 45 USD