Lear Pl. 274, Purple Heron

The Lear Pl. 274, Purple Heron is a captivating portrayal of this magnificent species.

Printed with archival pigments on rag watercolor paper, this modern facsimile print captures the sensitivity to detail and color found in Edward Lear’s original lithograph. Bring delight to your environment with the addition of this lovely print!

About Lear’s 50 Best – Oppenheimer Field Museum Edition

The Oppenheimer Field Museum Edition of Edward Lear’s artwork offers a selection of his finest works housed in the Field Museum as modern facsimile prints. These limited-edition fine art prints are faithful facsimiles of a number of his artworks from the following publications: Family of Toucans, Birds of Europe, Family of Psittacidae or Parrots, A Monograph of the Testudinata, and Gleanings from The Menagerie and Aviary at Knowsley Hall.

About Edward Lear

One of the great ornithological artists of his era, the multi-talented Edward Lear (1804 – 1888) was a self-taught naturalist and painter who later became famous for authoring books of nonsense poems and limericks. Edward Lear’s exacting and masterly skill as an artist was employed by other major publishers of nineteenth-century English ornithologies and natural histories. Edward Lear’s work is distinguished by the fact that he was among the first bird artists to draw primarily from living examples, recording not only the precise details of the birds he painted but also expressing his ornithological subjects’ unique character. The plates Edward Lear contributed to John Gould’s Birds of Europe are among the finest of that work. These rare, beautifully hand-colored plates are signed by Lear on the lithographic stones.

About Oppenheimer Editions

Established in 1999, our publishing company Oppenheimer Editions was developed in order to produce modern facsimiles of historic works of art. Marrying cutting-edge digital printing technologies with canonical works of art, Oppenheimer Editions has partnered with prestigious museums to make their holdings accessible to the public as fine art prints. Works from the New-York Historical Society’s unrivaled collections of John James Audubon’s watercolors and the Hudson River School paintings are examples of art that otherwise would be unobtainable.

Among the institutional collections we have partnered with are the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum, and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Our Oppenheimer Editions prints are not mere reproductions. Rather, they are limited-edition fine art prints made with the finest quality archival pigments on rag watercolor paper and executed to exacting standards.

For more information about Lear Pl. 274, Purple Heron, email us at [email protected] or check out our articles The Interconnection between Rationality and Nonsense in Edward Lear’s Artwork and The Inclusion of Foreign Avian Species in Gould’s Birds of Europe.

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