Turkey Vintage 1984 Bird Print Captain Thomas Brown
A colour print, rescued from a disbound book of Bird prints from 1984, with another picture or unrelated text on the reverse. This is a 1984 reprint of a book plate from c1831
Suitable for framing, the image size is approx 9.25" x 11.5" or 23cm x 29cm plus a small white border. Page has been trimmed to keep within Royal Mail large letter size.
This is a vintage print and can show signs of age or previous use commensurate with the age of the print. Please view any scans as they form part of the description.
All pictures will be sent bagged and in a board backed envelope for protection in transit.
While every care is taken to ensure my scans or photos accurately represent the item offered for sale, due to differences in monitors and internet pages my pictures may not be an exact match in brightness or contrast to the actual item.
Text taken from the opposite page. Please note this cannot be supplied with the print due to being on the reverse side of the previous print. Any spelling errors are due to the OCR program used.
Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Plate 67 from Illustrations of the American Ornithology of Alexander Wilson and Charles Lucian Bonaparte. . ., by Captain Thomas Brown, Edinburgh, 1831
Alexander Wilson (1766-1813) gave great impetus to the study of American birds. Born in Scotland, he sailed to America in 1794. He was a profoundly able naturalist, his great ambition was to study and describe as many species as he could, and to write a competent American Ornithology. Lack of financial backing, poor health and his early death at the age of forty-seven, prevented the fulfilment of his hopes, but he rather than Audubon is regarded by a very large number of professional ornithologists as the founder of American ornithology in its present form. Audubon was nevertheless a more competent painter and was able to design on a large scale. He was also extremely ambitious and wrote to one of his friends, when he found that Wilson's work was being prepared for publication: 'I will push my publication with such unremitting vigour that my book will come before the public before Wilson's can be got out.' He succeeded and both Wilson's own work and the above compilation by Brown (from various sources) were not able to compete when it came to sales.
Some of Brown's plates are very fine; others, such as one showing a Snowy Owl sitting on a southern magnolia tree, are unfortunate. This illustration of the turkeys is one of the most attractive. The bibliographic history of Brown's publication is interesting. It has been discussed by W. Faxon in two numbers of The Auk (1903 :236-41; 1919 :623-6).