B Gould’s Book of Birds

Gould’s Book of Birds

John Gould (1804–81) was the greatest of all Victorian ornithologists, and the foremost figure in British 19th-century natural history illustration. He is best known as author of the sumptuous The Birds of Australia (1848) and this book, The Birds of Great Britain (1873).

Gould played a decisive role in helping Charles Darwin form his theories of evolutionary biology and natural selection: it was he who identified birds from the Galápagos Islands as an entirely new group of finches, and not a variety of blackbird as Darwin had assumed.

Gould’s five-volume, elephant folio The Birds of Great Britain is the most beautiful book of British ornithological illustration ever published. Gould financed it by subscription, printing a run of only 750 copies. The subscribers included some of the leading names of the age, among them Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, King Leopold II of the Belgians and Charles Dickens – although neither Prince Albert nor Dickens lived to see the work completed. Each five-volume set contains 367 hand-coloured lithographs, making in all an astonishing 275,250 individually painted plates. The images reproduced here confirm that Gould was a highly sensitive observer of his subjects’ anatomy, plumage and behavioural characteristics, taking infinite care to match the colours used by his artists to the precise hues of his specimens. He was also pioneering in his interest in the ecology of birds, making special study of their diet, nesting materials and wider habitat. Shown in these pages are images that capture the visual glory of Gould’s book, from the Dartford Warbler to the Glossy Ibis, by way of the Golden Oriole, Roseate Tern, Greenland Falcon, Roller, Pine-Grosbeak and Jack Snipe. Regrettably, many of the original 750 sets of Gould’s book have been mutilated by print dealers eager to sell the plates at premium prices. By contrast, Marlborough’s set is complete and in remarkably fine condition. It was donated to the College by Herbert Leaf (1854–1936), long-serving Assistant Master, sometime Mayor of Marlborough and generous benefactor to the school. The book had belonged to his father, Charles Leaf, a successful silk merchant and one of Gould’s original subscribers.