John Gould (3) (1804–1881)

This is a quick and dirty summary of John Gould's Birds from a bird art standpoint.

This book should be more properly titled: John Gould's Birds of Great Britain. Between 1862 and 1873 Gould published a five volume series called Birds of Great Britain that consisted of 367 hand-colored lithographs. Those plates are reproduced in this volume.

The book itself is quite large (quarto-ish), the width and height of the pages being approximately 26 cm x 33.8 cm (10.25" x 13.3") which may lead you to think that the plates would be equally as large. But that is not the case. Granted, it would be impossible to reproduce 367 plates on 239 pages, I get that, but I expected the result to somehow be a lot more pleasing. There are a small handful of page-sized plates measuring roughly 23.5 cm x 29.85 cm (9.25" x 11.75"), but the great majority are essentially postcard-sized reproductions measuring 11.75 cm x 17.15 cm (4.62" x 6.75").

Copies of this book can be found fairly cheap, but at the end of the day this volume of John Gould bird art is extremely underwhelming. I would save your money and find something better, with larger reproductions, if you really want a nice book depicting John Gould's bird art of Great Britain.… (mehr)

This is a large format printing (14 5/8 " tall by 10 3/4 " wide) of images of owls, photographed from original publications, by some of the greatest bird illustrators of the 19th century. Working in an era when photography of their subjects was not available, they raised the task of depicting their subjects to high art. Each print rewards the viewer with an astonishing wealth of detail, and shows why such drawings and paintings still have the power to reveal as much, or in some cases more, about the birds than any photograph. They distill the subject to its essence, removing distracting and irrelevant surroundings, while often including just enough of a natural setting to be suggestive. In this book you also can compare the different styles of the artists and decide for yourself which you prefer. Finally, if you love owls, you cannot fail to enjoy these marvelous works of art.… (mehr)