Category Archives: Birds and Animal Art

Read about Bird and Wildlife Art created by the greatest naturalists from the gold age of exploration.

The 17th through 19th centuries were a time of rapid scientific and artistic progress.  It was a time of discovery.  New species were documented by the great naturalists of the time such as Mark Catesby, John Gould, and Daniel Giraud Elliot.  Each of whom devoted their lives to expanding our knowledge of birds and animals and to appreciating their beauty.

Learn more in our featured articles such as The Interconnection between Rationality and Nonsense in Edward Lear’s Artwork, the The Mystery of the Extinct Great Auk, and Was Alexander Wilson’s Art Precursive of the Modern Field Guide?.

Casualties of Fashion: The Contentious History of Plume Plundering

Though the idea of ornamenting oneself with a bird carcass may be a bit deterring [...]

The Birds of Paradise: One of Nature’s Most Elusive, Ostentatious, and Promiscuous Families

The Introduction of Birds-of-Paradise to the Western Imagination [...]

The Articulation of Macabre Bird Habits in John Gould’s Prints

Exposing the unsavory tendencies of the Common Cuckoo and Great Grey Shrike in Gould’s Birds [...]

Recent Acquisitions – Original Paintings by Louis Agassiz Fuertes

A beautiful selection of original watercolor paintings by renowned artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes has recently [...]

The Inclusion of Foreign Avian Species in Gould’s Birds of Europe

When browsing the contents of John Gould’s compendious Birds of Europe, the majority of the [...]

Was Alexander Wilson’s Art Precursive of the Modern Field Guide?

An examination of the stylistic qualities of Wilson’s art in relation to modern standards of [...]

Spontaneous Surrealism in Mark Catesby’s Artwork

An investigation of the thematic confluences between Surrealist art and Catesby’s prints [...]

The Evolution of Audubon’s White-headed Eagle

The confluence of creative mechanisms behind Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon’s depictions of the [...]

The Most Notorious Goose in America

The Canada Goose and its Subspecies [...]

The Mystery of the Extinct Great Auk

An Exploration of the Historical and Artistic Remanence of the Only Flightless Bird of the [...]

A Comparative Analysis of the Bird Prints of Prideaux John Selby and His Contemporaries

An exploration of the creative confluences and stylistic continuities between the artwork of Selby and [...]

Audubon’s Havell Edition of the Raven and American Crow

Sensorial engagement and the challenging of object-viewer relations in Audubon's prints [...]

Catesby’s Crustaceans – Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands

Picturing Oddity and Abundance in British Colonial America. [...]

Symbiosis of Art and Science in Audubon’s Pileated Woodpecker

The twofold nature of Audubon’s prints as both artistic and scientific is exemplified in his [...]

The Abyssinian Bird Portraits of Louis Agassiz Fuertes

A consideration of the creative techniques and viewer-object relations in Fuertes's watercolors [...]

“A Transcript from Living Nature”

An overview of the structural blueprint underlying Alexander Wilson's American Ornithology [...]

The Interconnection between Rationality and Nonsense in Edward Lear’s Artwork

A consideration of the relationship between Lear's scientific illustrations and Nonsense-verse caricatures. [...]