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John Gould and the bird illustrators

Prepared By Carol Cantrell as the basis for a talk presented to The Australian Museum Society on 21 and 23 April 1998

John Gould was a man loved, revered and hated. How you look on him depends on who you read and what you want to believe. Was he a loving father and husband or did he work his artist wife to the point of exhaustion? Did he have charm or was he really the uncouth glutton who ate a dozen budgerigars at one sitting? Gould has been described as having a heart of gold under a rough exterior, to some a generous man, but to others a penny pincher with an eye to the main chance. Possibly he was all of these, but from this distance in time we can be sure of at least two things. John Gould was a self-made man, and he left a legacy to the world of natural history that has seldom been rivalled.

With no formal education he commenced his working life at the age of 13, following in his father's footsteps as a garden hand. A self-taught taxidermist, he was from an early age fascinated by nature in general and ornithology in particular.

At the age of 21 he set up his own taxidermy business in London, and in the London Directory for 1832-4, was listed as "a bird and beast stuffer". The following year he appeared in the directory as "a naturalist".

This was a time of world exploration and thousands of exotic and unknown animals were arriving in London as expeditions brought collections home. These specimens, for the most part dead and preserved, though with the occasional live animal, were bought on arrival by taxidermists, collectors and dealers in skins. They were prepared and then sold on to museums and private collections.

There was a craze for natural history and John Gould was in the perfect position to become an important player.

In 1828 Gould accepted the position of Curator and Preserver to the Museum of the Zoological Society of London, at a salary of £100 per annum. At the same time he continued his private taxidermy business, acted as advisor to national institutions and travelled widely in England and on the Continent, buying and selling specimens.

In 1829 Gould married Elizabeth Coxen, a governess and competent artist. In 1830 he published his first scientific paper. Three hundred more were to follow, many of them illustrated. Shortly after their marriage the Goulds began their magnificent publishing enterprise.

The surge of interest in natural history in the 19th century came at a time when book production exploded as a result of the harnessing of steam power to drive the printing presses. This wonderful combination sparked a light in Gould's entrepreneurial eye. Cheaper, illustrated, popular titles were suddenly readily available to a larger portion of the reading population than ever before.

But this was not Gould's chosen market. His books were to be high quality, expensive and financed by advance subscription. This was a proven method of publishing used in the two previous centuries, and an almost sure way of financing the production successfully.

In centuries past, printed books were illustrated by woodcuts, engravings and etchings. Lithography, though invented in the late eighteenth century, was not seen as a suitable method for animal illustration until used in 1818 in a German bird book. The English naturalist, William Swainson, was an early convert to the process, using it for his Zoological illustrations in 1820-23.

Suddenly it was seen that lithography offered a new freedom to the artist, as the illustration could be drawn directly onto the chalky limestone block with special crayon pens. After the greasy crayon was applied, the block was washed with nitric acid and wiped with gum arabic.

The printing process is based on the antipathy of grease to water. The stone was made wet, and the oily ink applied. This only adhered to the area of the greasy crayon, recoiling from the dampened section. The paper was then placed upon the stone, run through a special printing press and the ink design was transferred in reverse to the paper.

Edward Lear, an extremely accomplished bird artist, better known to most people as the author and illustrator of A book of nonsense rhymes, had taught Elizabeth Gould to produce lithographic blocks, and together they began to work on Gould's early major works.

Over a period of fifty years, John Gould and his artists produced 14 titles in 49 volumes published in Imperial Folio format. Each bird or mammal was illustrated by a large, hand coloured lithograph - an amazing total of 2999 individual plates. In addition there were several smaller books, each lavishly illustrated.

Following the traditional marketing strategy for such volumes, Gould's books came out in parts; each part consisting of a number of hand coloured plates with Gould's accompanying text dealing with each plate. Each part was issued in cardboard covers, the subscriber being responsible for the binding of the complete set when all parts had been received. Consequently, as each set was bound to the instructions of its owner, there is no "common" binding for any one title.

Gould's advance publicity and prospectus was most successful. "Gould's subscribers included 107 libraries, clubs and institutions, and no less than 12 Monarchs, 11 Royal Highnesses, 16 Dukes, 6 Marquises, 30 Earls, 5 Counts, 31 Honorables, 61 Baronets and one Bishop."

A Century of Birds from the Himalayan Mountains [1830-33], was John Gould's first ambitious undertaking. This comprised 80 lithographs, prepared by Elizabeth, depicting 100 species of birds, and giving the title "a century of birds". The birds were originally sketched by Gould, painted by Elizabeth, and the plates then lithographed by Elizabeth. The printed plates were hand coloured by teams of professional colourists, to correspond to Elizabeth's original water colour paintings

Elizabeth's brothers Charles and Stephen Coxen had emigrated to Australia, and settled in the Hunter Valley in NSW. They had sent Gould skins of some of the very colourful birds they had shot or trapped. Elizabeth had prepared illustrations of these birds for a book The birds of Australia and adjacent islands but after twenty plates, Gould realised he needed many more specimens to continue. He abandoned this book, demanding that the subscribers return the parts already received. Some did, and the parts returned were reused in the new books or destroyed. Those plates not returned, known as the "suppressed parts", are consequently extremely valuable.

Once John Gould saw the necessity for a trip to Australia, he determined that Elizabeth must go too, in order to make her drawings on the spot. Elizabeth had given birth to six children, four surviving at this time and was a devoted and loving mother. However, she was also a devoted wife, and they arranged for the baby and two young children to stay with Elizabeth's mother.

John and Elizabeth travelled to Australia in 1838 and spent 19 months during which time John collected many specimens new to science and prepared many drawings and watercolours for The Birds of Australia 1840-48, and The Mammals of Australia 1845-63, now considered to be his greatest scientific achievement.

Elizabeth worked hard in Australia. She had with her, her eldest son Henry, aged seven and a half, and gave birth to her seventh child, Franklin. At times she lived in camp with her husband and the children, and said in her journal that she produced drawings and watercolours day after day. She sorely missed her children and her letters to her mother clearly show how she longed to see them again.

Tragically, on their return from Australia, she died in 1841 aged 37, after the birth of her eighth child. Of the Gould's eight children, six survived to adulthood. Gould had lost not only his much loved wife and mother of his children, but he had lost his principal illustrator.

He also lost the services of the excellent artist Edward Lear.

Edward Lear, writer of nonsense rhymes, and artist and lithographer, began in 1830, to produce his own major work on parrots. This was Illustrations of the family of Psittacidae or Parrots. He sketched his birds from life at the Regent's Park Zoo and drew them in reverse straight onto the lithographic stones, usually life size. With a subscribers' list of 175, this must be seen as an amazing undertaking for a young man of 18. Unfortunately, Lear did not make any profit from the work, and stopped production after Part XII, but the collection of 42 hand-coloured lithographs was the first book of imperial folio lithographed birds published in Britain. John Gould bought up the remainder of Lear's stock but never completed the work.

Lear taught Elizabeth Gould the art of lithography and assisted her with the plates for A century of birds... Gould did not acknowledge Lear's contribution to these plates. Lear worked for six years with Gould on The birds of Europe. On some of the plates Lear's signature is shown, but Gould persisted in putting his and Elizabeth's names as artists and lithographers. This is shown as Del et lith to indicated the delineator or illustrator and the lithographer.

Gould felt that having paid for a lithograph, it was his property, and he had no compunction about putting his own name to it. When Gould failed to attribute Lear's plates in the second edition volume on the Toucans, Lear began to feel badly done by. He continued to work with Gould on the monograph of the Trogons, and on the lithographs in Darwin's Zoology of the voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle

Lear eventually left the partnership in a very ill humour, declaring Gould to be a harsh and violent man. "In this earliest phase of his bird-drawing he owes everything to his excellent wife, & myself, - without whose help in drawing he had done nothing." (Jackson, C. E. 1975, p. 55)

Gould was in the process of issuing the seven volume Birds of Australia and the Supplement when Elizabeth died and he was fortunate in finding a sympathetic artist and lithographer in H. C. Richter. Over the next seven years Richter used the skins and drawings John and Elizabeth had brought from Australia and produced the majority of the 681 plates. Richter worked with Gould on 32 drawings and plates of American partridges, and 360 drawings and lithographs for Gould's Hummingbirds. His best work for Gould is considered to be the Birds of Great Britain. Josef Wolf contributed drawings to this volume but Richter produced over 300 of the 367 plates and shared the lithography with William Hart.

Gould died before completion of The birds of Asia. This was the final Gould book Richter worked on, contributing some 500 plates. Richter, from a family of renowned artists and artisans, also found time to produce plates for the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London and Sir Richard Owen's Memoirs on the extinct wingless birds of New Zealand. Richter, now 60 years old, had contributed 1600 folio plates illustrating the best known bird books of the nineteenth century.

William Hart, another of Gould's artists, was a colourer of plates and he continued this occupation while drawing and lithographing for Gould. He coloured Richter's plates for the Hummingbirds, using lavish metallic paints. As artist and lithographer he worked on The birds of Great Britain, The birds of Asia, The birds of New Guinea, A monograph of the Pittidae, the 2nd edition of A monograph of the Trogonidae, or the Trogons, and the supplement of A monograph of the Trochilidae, or family of Hummingbirds.

Josef Wolf was one of a group of Continental bird painters to settle in London in the second half of the 19th century and a pioneer in the field of animal illustration. He was an accomplished lithographer but by the time he drew for Gould he had abandoned lithography to devote his time to drawing and painting. He produced water colours for Gould's Birds of Great Britain but objected to the way the lithographer filled in the backgrounds, and to the over colouring of the finished print. Both Gould and Richter liked a lot of colour, and this is one often made criticism of their work.

Apart from Hart, Gould's other main colourist was Gabriel Bayfield, who led a team of professional colourists. Bayfield and his staff were responsible for the colouring of almost all of Gould's plates between 1831 and 1861. This included 171,376 plates in Birds of Europe, 145,200 plates in birds of Australia, 26,572 plates in Mammals of Australia to list a few very impressive figures. As Bayfield aged, Hart began to take over the business, and in 1861 became responsible for the colouring team.

Gould's name lives on as "The Bird Man" and while it seems obvious he couldn't have made his name without the assistance of a talented team of artists, lithographers and colourists, he was, nonetheless,a man with a vision; to bring birds to the world, and to make his fortune doing it.

Copyright © Australian Museum, 2002