BIRDS: Ornithology and The Great Bird Artists

Devout birder and ornithologist Roger J. Lederer celebrates the heyday of avian illustration in 40 artists' profiles. He begins with the work of Flemish painter Frans Snyders in the early 1600s and Francis Willughby's 'The Ornithology of Francis Willughby: In Three Books Where in All the Birds Hitherto Known' (1678) with meticulous woodcuts examples, John James Audubon and his Birds of America 1838, to Elizabeth Gould's 19th century renderings of museum specimens from the Himalayas and Lars Jonsson's ethereal watercolours. Rembrandt, Rubens, Fabritius, painter and etcher Francis Barlow (1626-1704), best known for designing 110 woodcuts for John Ogilby's 1665 edition of Aesop's Fables, peacocks, doves and turkeys, chickens and ducks by Marmaduke Cradock (1660-1716), Englishman Mark Catesby who studied natural history in London and moved to Virginia in 1712 with his interest in botanical specimens, woodpeckers and the Chattering Plover and Blue Jays. George Edwards, Thomas Bewick with his spectacular engravings of woodpeckers, ducks and crows, Lady Elizabeth Symonds Gwillim with a spectacular full page colour illustration of a Crested Honey Buzzard from 1801 and bronze-winged Jacana. Alexander Wilson with his wading birds and Audubon's eagles, Edward Lear with his parrots and owls, Joseph Wolf with his spectacularly coloured pheasants, and that is only halfway through this spectacular book. Archibald Thorburn, Keith Shackleton, Janet Turner, to contemporary artists like Raymond Harris-Ching, here are unusual compositions and almost photorealistic lithographs, paintings and illustrations. A compendium of extraordinarily beautiful specimens, here is observation in art and science at its finest. 224pp, 25.5 x 28.7cm.