Category: Interview

Throughout her life, Elizabeth Gould’s work was appreciated mostly through her husbands projects documenting the birds of the world, including John Gould’s Exotic Birds, and she was therefore often not recognised under her own name. Following her tragic death at the age of 37, her artistic talents were nearly forgotten, and her name was completely unfamiliar in the art world.

Birds of the World: The Art of Elizabeth Gould is an incredible, one of a kind volume brought to you by Andrea Hart and Ann Datta, offering a remarkable tribute to Elizabeth’s artwork, reputation and skill. Containing over 200 beautifully detailed and scientifically precise illustrations depicting birds from 19th-century Europe, South America, Central America, Africa, Asia, and Australia, as well as previously unpublished artworks and an introduction to Gould’s life and achievements, this book is a lasting legacy for one of the greatest bird painters in history.

The authors kindly took the time to answer our questions about the inspiration and research behind the book – read our Q&A below. 

Could you tell us a little about how you first began studying Elizabeth Gould’s work and the drivers behind embarking on this book project? 

The Natural History Museum was initially approached by the publisher, Prestel, early last year asking if we might consider working with them on a book on Elizabeth Gould. As Andrea had already published a book on the women artists represented in the Museum’s collections and Ann has published a significant work on the correspondence of John Gould, this felt like a wonderful opportunity to bring the spotlight to Elizabeth and highlight her story and the incredible artist she was.

How did you gather the work for this collection? Did you have access to some of Elizabeth’s original plates?

The Museum’s Library and Archives has an incredible collection of books, manuscripts and artworks and is particularly strong and comprehensive in taxonomic works on natural history. Our rare books collection therefore has sets of all the Gould’s published works, including those published following Elizabeth’s untimely death. While we held some examples of Elizabeth’s original works already, notably the ones she completed for William Jardine, we were incredibly fortunate to have been permanently allocated an album of her and John’s original works through the Acceptance in Lieu scheme of Arts Council England. This publication therefore gave us a wonderful opportunity to share some of these historically significant original drawings with a wider audience, and to further appreciate her artistic talent. 

Do you have some favourite images among the plates Elizabeth made?

This is a really tricky question as most of the illustrations that we chose are most of our favourites! Ann specifically likes the bowerbirds, the Narina Trogon, the quetzal and the Australian wren and Andrea became quite fond of the toucans (but also had to include a magpie).

It’s clear from the biography of Elizabeth Gould in your book that she was incredibly industrious and hard-working, and that she experienced a great deal in her short life during a remarkable period in history. Do you get a sense that Elizabeth Gould paved the way for more women to work as artists in this field?

There is no evidence that Elizabeth Gould was influential in inspiring other women to become bird artists due, probably, to her short life. After her death in 1841, Gould’s folios were continued seamlessly by the draughtsmanship of Elizabeth’s successor, Henry Constantine Richter. Only those who knew the Goulds intimately would have been aware of her early contribution to the success of the folios. John Gould went on producing bird books for another 40 years, their contemporaries died and few questioned who was the ‘E’ in the ‘J & E Gould’ plate credits in the earlier books.   

Also, although Elizabeth may have been a promising artist as a young woman, it was not an easy career path to succeed in, and she chose to become a governess with more security. Elizabeth probably would not have become a bird artist had she not married John. John had the scientific knowledge to identify the birds in the preserved, dried skins and provided sketches to guide Elizabeth’s meticulous watercolours. They were truly an equal partnership. 

During Elizabeth’s lifetime, plants were a much more popular subject for women artists to take up than animal subjects, and a few women who were Elizabeth’s contemporaries were successful in this line. But in general, there were few opportunities for women to follow a successful career in art.

I found it fascinating that many of Elizabeth’s plates are made using a lithographic process. I wonder if you could elaborate a little on that process and the time it would have taken to produce an individual plate?

All Elizabeth Gould’s published plates for John Gould were made by the lithographic process. Lithography seems a very strange process but in the 19th century it was adopted by hundreds of aspiring artists of all subjects – history paintings, genre scenes, topography and natural history. The lithographic method dominated print and book plate production in the 19th century replacing the more expensive engraving process. By using lithography, artists could make monochrome prints of their original paintings which they could sell to the public – the rising middle classes who wanted affordable art to hang in their homes. Learning and doing the lithography themselves had two advantages for the artists: total control of the print-making process and avoiding the expense of hiring a lithographer. Those artists who mastered the technique, such as George Scharf, had no need to go to the extra expense of adding colour as they could create great delicacy of tones and lines in landscapes and street scenes etc,  just by adding shading and stippling effects on the stone. Some of the most acclaimed natural history artists such as Edward Lear (contemporary of Elizabeth) and Joseph Wolf learned lithography. Lithography was especially well-suited to reproducing bird plumages, from soft down to large feathers.  

The process of lithography consists of drawing or painting with greasy crayons and inks on fine-grained limestone blocks. At the lithographic printer, where the stone would be taken after the artist had finished, the stone would be moistened with water. The parts not covered by the crayon would become wet while the others where the greasy drawing was made would repel the water and remain dry. In a special lithographic press the printer would rub an oily ink with a roller over the stone. The oily ink would adhere only to the drawing but be repelled by the wet parts of the stone. After a sheet of paper was pressed against the inked drawing an exact copy of the original on the stone would be transferred to the paper but in reverse. The process would be repeated until the requisite number of prints was taken after which the stones would be cleaned for the next person, although the stone with its original drawing could be preserved for several years. The stones were very heavy. A Gould plate measured 22 × 16 inches. A stone measuring 18 × 22 inches would be about 3 inches thick and weigh 100 pounds.

The Art of Drawing on Stone, courtesy of archive.org

The lithographic printer Charles Hullmandel was responsible for all Elizabeth’s plates. His book, The art of drawing on stone (1824), has a vignette on the titlepage of a woman working on a stone. The first prints that came off his printing press – proof plates before lettering – were sent to Gould to approve. Then they went back to Hullmandel for him to add lettering to the stone according to Gould’s instruction (title = bird name, credits to the names of the artists, lithographer and printer). The proof plate after lettering, still a monochrome print, would go back to Gould again for her to colour to match her original watercolour.  This artist’s colour proof would go to Gabriel Bayfield, the proprietor of a firm of colourists used for all Elizabeth’s plates, for his employees to copy the proof print on the requisite number of copies of each plate that Gould ordered. 

Using this complicated and time-consuming process, each title took several years to complete. The books were sold by subscription (maximum number of subscribers often 250) who received parts, perhaps four times a year, and each part might contain 20 hand-coloured plates. The time taken to produce a lithograph would depend on the competence and confidence of the lithographer, and the complexity of the subject. 

Elizabeth’s life contained many intense hardships. Aside from her incredible artworks, is there much record of her personal life and experience, such as in letters and diaries?

Very little extant information exists about Elizabeth with only about 15 letters dating between 1838 and 1840 surviving, all of which are now preserved in the Mitchell Library in Sydney, Australia. They were written by Elizabeth to her mother and cousin who had moved into her house in London to look after the children while Elizabeth and John were in Australia. The letters record some details of their visit including the people she met, especially Sir John and Lady Franklin, who accommodated them for nearly 12 months in Tasmania. Other topics include some of the problems faced by European settlers, e.g. acquiring servants, schooling, and the adverse climate, John’s collecting trips and his helpful Aboriginal guides, and making plant drawings. She writes proudly about her new son Franklin, born in Tasmania in Government House, and regularly enquires about the health of her mother and children. She does, however, reveal profound sadness at being away from her three young children in London. 

In addition, there is one earlier letter written by Elizabeth in 1827 to her mother when she was working as a governess in London before her marriage. Only a fragment of a diary written by Elizabeth over the few days from 21st August to 30th September 1839 is known. It was written after she had left Tasmania and travelled to New South Wales to stay with her brother Stephen Coxen.  In it she describes seeing several unusual birds. 

From other sources it is possible to glean a few snippets about John and Elizabeth’s life in London. For example, she travelled with John to visit museums in Europe, and she probably accompanied him on some visits to Sir William Jardine’s estate. In a letter to Stephen, John Gould wrote in May 1841 that all the family had gone to stay in Egham for four months (Egham was then a village in the country).

In what ways does the industry of art for scientific publications differ today? Are there any similarities to the time in which Elizabeth was active? 

Elizabeth Gould’s bird drawings served the scientific community. Accuracy of posture, colours and pattern of plumage and external anatomy were particularly important, alongside the impact of an attractive image, all of which are still required for taxonomic identification today. This could be achieved by painting the figure on a branch or on the ground according to its natural habits, often in a profile position. For Elizabeth, we believe, she would have started with a pencil outline, following the sketch that John would have made to assist her assemble a life-like figure from a dried bird skin. Elizabeth’s first meticulous drawings were rather conventional figures of very static birds – a style which persisted for many years until it was broken by John James Audubon in the early 19th century.  Audubon spent many years in the field in North America and was the first to successfully paint the birds in their authentic natural habitat. Influenced by Lear and Audubon, Elizabeth would gradually develop her technique to produce more lively birds reaching a pinnacle in the Birds of Australia with the inclusion of appropriate flora and landscapes. 

Today, an aspiring artist might attend art school before specialising in natural history art. Those who progress onto becoming wildlife artists would still observe their subjects in the wild and have additional equipment and technology to assist them, including binoculars and digital cameras to record and perfect their art. The detail required remains the same in terms of studying the subject’s internal and external anatomy and showing in their illustrations the required detail to be able to determine differences between species. 

Bird art, however, includes many different styles and techniques which can change according to the artist’s preferences or the client’s requirements. There is, for example, a particular style used in field guides to compare large numbers of species on a page. Bird monographs, on the other hand, might just focus on a particular family and devote a whole page to an image of just one species showing male, female and juveniles, and so there is endless variety depending on the nature of the publication. Some bird artists, such as John Busby, also have a uniquely ‘casual’ style that is perfectly capable of depicting birds accurately and recognisably, but is very different from that of a more traditional modern bird artist such as the brilliant Robert Gillmor, who sadly passed last year. Those that illustrate for scientific purposes would also, just like Elizabeth, need recourse to examining bird skins or taxidermy in museum collections at some stage in their work. 

Digital photography has certainly made images of birds and the natural world more widely available for guides and species identification, but there is still definitely a demand for artists to illustrate new species and produce illustrations and detail that is not possible to achieve with a camera.

Do you have plans for any future projects or publications that you’d like to tell us about?

There are so many other collections and artworks held by the Natural History Museum that would be amazing to research and publish on. For Ann, who did publish a significant volume on the correspondence of John Gould, she has some additional research papers to complete and, if time permits, would like to publish a biography of Thomas Hardwicke, who was an army officer and naturalist in India. Andrea would like to work on the botanical artist Worthington George Smith and the natural history artist Denys Ovenden in addition to developing a new temporary exhibition on artworks in the Richard Owen collection at the Museum, for display in the Museum’s Images of Nature Gallery in 2024. 

Birds of the World: The Art of Elizabeth Gould was published by Prestel in September 2023 and is available from NHBS – Wildlife, Ecology & Conservation

The Atlas of Early Modern Wildlife is a ground-breaking volume compiling the observations of early modern amateur naturalists, travellers and local historians for the first time. Drawing on over 10,000 records, this book looks at the early modern state of wildlife in Britain and Ireland, the era before climate change, before the intensification of agriculture, before even the Industrial Revolution. The book presents maps and notes on the former distribution of 153 species, providing a new baseline against which to discuss subsequent declines and extinctions, expansions and introductions. This remarkable resource will be of great value to conservationists, archaeologists, historians and anyone with an interest in the natural heritage of Britain and Ireland.

Lee Raye is an associate lecturer at the Open University and a Fellow of the Linnaean Society, specialising in the history of wild animals and plants in pre-industrial Britan and Ireland. We were lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak with them about what inspired them to write this atlas, what the most difficult aspect of creating this book was, what their future plans were and much more.

What inspired you to write this atlas?  

Several years ago I worked for the RSPB. I went on a weekend induction to The Lodge in Sandy, Bedfordshire, and had a walk around with the reserve archaeologist. He explained that, although it was simple enough to know which animals had declined and gone extinct in the historical period, there was a lack of clarity about how and when this happened. I realised that I already had some of the answers he needed. Around that same time, as a research project, I was translating and analysing the records of wild animals and plants from a single 17th-century natural history book, Robert Sibbald’s Scotia Illustrata (1684). That source is really valuable because it was contributed to by so many people and contains so many important records. For example, there are records of the Great Auk, the Bustard and the Angel Shark amongst the animals and Darnel, Shepherd’s Needle, and Greater Water-parsnip amongst the plants. While doing this project, I started making a list of other comparable texts from the same time period, and to my surprise I realised there was a whole understudied genre of them! I realised that if I combined all of these sources together I could give a decent estimate of the distribution of species in the 16th-18th centuries. 

Do you think it’s possible for us to restore our wildlife to the condition it was in early modern Britain or has our landscape changed too drastically? 

When we are doing conservation work it’s really important that we have a strong baseline to work against, otherwise we don’t know when we are restoring biodiversity and when we are just adding species to an environment. I think the early modern period is a good choice of baseline for two reasons. First, it comes before some of the most alarming declines in biodiversity which followed trends like the industrial revolution, the 20th century agricultural revolution, and the gamekeeper culls of raptors and mammalian predators of the nineteenth and early 20th century. But it was still a period when all of Britain and Ireland was managed for human needs, including some big cities. Secondly, there are a lot of sources available from the time period, so the Atlas of Early Modern Wildlife could reconstruct the fauna found at the time. But we are never going to be able to perfectly return to that baseline. The islands of Britain and Ireland are even more intensively managed and exploited now, and we need to keep that up to provide for the human population. The early modern period was also a time when there was a temporary climate change, the Little Ice Age, which meant that the so-called ‘northern species’ were doing really well, and the ‘southern species’ had a more restricted range. Modern global heating is going to become much more severe than the Little Ice Age was, and is likely to magnify the differences so that Britain and Ireland in the 21st century is going to have significant differences in its flora and fauna to the 17th century, no matter what we do. 

The distribution trend for the majority of species mentioned in this book was either uncertain or unchanged, compared to 24 increases and 26 decreases. Did this surprise you? 

I knew that there would be lots of uncertainty in the data from the time period, but I was a bit surprised that so few species showed a decline in distribution. We know that we are in a biodiversity crisis now, but the declines in abundance we are currently facing are going to take some time to result in declines in distribution at a regional level, which is the rather crude metric I was able to track in the Atlas of Early Modern Wildlife. It’s also true that there have been official and unofficial reintroductions in the modern period, which have restored species like Beaver, Otter and Greylag Goose across much of their early modern range, meaning that comparing early modern and present distribution hides what happened to these species in between. 

You mention that there was a bias towards recording exploitable species in the early modern period and a bias towards recording birds now. Did this affect which species you were able to include in this book? 

Yes, with the exception of a few species of conservation concern, I included only the best-recorded species in my Atlas of Early Modern Wildlife. That means that there is a bias towards certain groups of species. For example, I was able to map the past distribution of 18 freshwater fishes but only five small songbirds. Don’t ask me about the distribution of the Sparrow or the Great Tit in the early modern period, because my sources don’t offer much data about them! 

What was the most difficult aspect of creating this book? 

The most complicated part of the Atlas of Early Modern Wildlife has been trying to solve the recorder-effort problem. I needed to be able to tell when species were not recorded because they were absent (like the Wolf, which seems to have been extinct in England and Wales already by this time period), and when animals were not recorded simply because not enough effort had been put into recording them (like those Sparrows and Great Tits which no-one really cared about). My solution was to statistically compare how many records I had for each species from different regions of Britain and Ireland with a figure of how well-recorded each different region was in the early modern period. I also used some habitat suitability modelling to try and establish patterns behind absences, but this has been complicated, speculative work! 

Do you have any future plans that you can tell us about? 

I think I could take this project further in the future. It should be possible to map the distribution of wild plants 250-500 years ago, or to join up the distribution of Britain and Ireland’s wildlife with the distribution of wildlife in other parts of Europe from the same time period. But I also want to work a bit more on poetry from the early modern period. There are a few very strange poems written c.1580-1650 that protest environmental destruction and are told from the perspective of animals which I think deserve to be much more widely known. 

The Atlas of Early Modern Wildlife by Lee Raye is due to be published by Pelagic Publishing in July 2023 and is available for pre-order from nhbs.com.