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John Gould (1804-1881) & Henry Constantine Richter (1821-1902)

19th century British illustrators best known for their bird and animal prints


Limited edition hand colored lithograph on paper


Titled Bourcieria Inca

Site: 19.5"x 13" Frame: 27"x 20.5"

Published in London 1849-87. Printed by Hullmandel and Walter from drawings by J. Gould, H.C. Richter and William Hart, lithographed by the artists. Published in London, 1849-87.

Looks good, in "as found" original untouched condition, age tone, foxing/stains, creases upper left, not examined out of the frame, frame has wear--please look at photos carefully. Glass is too large and must be removed before shipping.


Great looking composition by Gould and Richter! Gould’s hummingbirds are highly prized for their lavish botanical backgrounds and the iridescent paints often used. British ornithological artist John Gould created the largest and most spectacular body of bird prints in the 19th century. His volumes, containing hundreds of hand-colored lithographs, covered species from the Himalayas to New Guinea. All were issued in large-folio format, enabling Gould to show each bird’s appearance in detail, usually in its natural habitat. From 1832 to 1881 Gould traveled the world seeking new specimens, often writing the scientific texts himself. He oversaw every phase of his operation, from securing and drawing specimens to soliciting subscriptions. Other artists who assisted him had substantial reputations of their own. They include his wife Elizabeth, Edward Lear, Henry C. Richter, Josef Wolf and William Hart. This a fine example of Gould & Richter's hummingbird prints in good condition for its age. My price of $349 is extremely reasonable and far below what one would be expected to pay for it in a gallery or at auction. 



Please check out the other Gould & Richter prints as well as the other artwork in our store on ebay. We regularly feature newly acquired artwork, from antique and vintage to contemporary and modern. Select the "See other items" tab on our page. Always buying Artwork-Cash Paid- easily find us at EastCoastArtGallery on the internet, instagram and facebook.
 
Biography: 

John Gould 

John Gould was an English ornithologist and bird artist.  The Gould League in Australia was named after him.  His identification of the birds now nicknamed "Darwin's finches" played a role in the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.  Gould's work is referenced in Charles Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species.

Gould was born in Lyme Regis, Dorset, the son of a gardener, and the boy probably had a scanty education.  Shortly afterwards his father obtained a position on an estate near Guildford, Surrey, and then in 1818 became foreman in the Royal Gardens of Windsor.  He was for some time under the care of J T Aiton, of the Royal Gardens of Windsor.  The young Gould started training as a gardener, being employed under his father at Windsor from 1818 to 1824, and he was subsequently a gardener at Ripley Castle in Yorkshire.  He became an expert in the art of taxidermy, and in 1824 he set himself up in business in London as a taxidermist, and his skill led to him becoming the first Curator and Preserver at the museum of the Zoological Society of London in 1827.

Gould's position brought him into contact with the country's leading naturalists, and also meant that he was often the first to see new collections of birds given to the Society.  In 1830 a collection of birds arrived from the Himalayas, many not previously described.  Gould published these birds in A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains (1830-1832).  The text was by Nicholas Aylward Vigors, and the illustrations were lithographed by Gould's wife Elizabeth, daughter of Nicholas Coxen of Kent. 

This work was followed by four more in the next seven years including Birds of Europe in five volumes - completed in 1837, with the text written by Gould himself, edited by his clerk Edwin Prince.  Some of the illustrations were made by Edward Lear as part of his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae in 1832.  Lear however was in financial difficulty, and he sold the entire set of lithographs to Gould.  The books were published in a very large size, imperial folio, with magnificent coloured plates.  Eventually 41 of these volumes were published with about 3000 plates.  They appeared in parts at £3 3s. a number, subscribed for in advance, and in spite of the heavy expense of preparing the plates, Gould succeeded in making his ventures pay and in realizing a fortune.  In 1838 he and his wife moved to Australia to work on the Birds of Australia and shortly after his return to England, his wife died in 1841.

When Charles Darwin presented his mammal and bird specimens collected during the second voyage of HMS Beagle to the Geological Society of London at their meeting on 4 January 1837, the bird specimens were given to Gould for identification.  He set aside his paying work and at the next meeting on 10 January reported that birds from the Galápagos Islands, which Darwin had thought were blackbirds, "gross-bills" and finches were in fact "a series of ground Finches which are so peculiar" as to form "an entirely new group, containing 12 species." This story made the newspapers. 

In March, Darwin met Gould again, learning that his Galápagos "wren" was another species of finch and the mockingbirds he had labeled by island were separate species rather than just varieties, with relatives on the South American mainland.  Subsequently Gould advised that the smaller southern Rhea specimen that had been rescued from a Christmas dinner was a separate species which he named Rhea darwinii, whose territory overlapped with the northern rheas. 

Darwin had not bothered to label his finches by island, but others on the expedition had taken more care.  He now sought specimens collected by captain Robert FitzRoy and crewmen.  From them he was able to establish that the species were unique to islands, an important step on the inception of his theory of evolution by natural selection.  Gould's work on the birds was published between 1838 and 1842 in five numbers as Part 3 of Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, edited by Charles Darwin.

In 1838 the Goulds sailed to Australia intending to study the birds of that country and be the first to produce a major work on the subject.  They took with them the collector John Gilbert. They arrived in Tasmania in September, making the acquaintance of the governor Sir John Franklin and his wife.  Gould and Gilbert collected on the island. 

In February 1839 Gould sailed to Sydney, leaving his pregnant wife with the Franklins.  He travelled to his brother-in-law's station at Yarrundi, spending his time searching for bowerbirds in the Liverpool Range.  In April he returned to Tasmania for the birth of his son.  In May he sailed to Adelaide to meet Charles Sturt, who was preparing to lead an expedition to the Murray River.  Gould collected in the Mount Lofty range, the Murray Scrubs and Kangaroo Island, returning again to Hobart in July. He then travelled with his wife to Yarrundi. They returned home to England in May 1840.

The result of the trip was The Birds of Australia (1840-1848).  It included a total of 600 plates in seven volumes, 328 of which were new to science and named by Gould.  He also published A Monograph of the Macropodidae, or Family of Kangaroos (1841-1842) and the three volume work The Mammals of Australia (1849-1861).

Elizabeth died in 1841, and Gould's books subsequently used illustrations by a number of artists, including Henry Constantine Richter, William Matthew Hart and Joseph Wolf.  Throughout his professional life Gould had a strong interest in hummingbirds.  He accumulated a collection of 320 species, which he exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Despite his interest Gould had never seen a live hummingbird. 

In May 1857 he travelled to the United States with his second son Charles.  He arrived in New York too early in the season to see hummingbirds in that city, but on 21 May 1857 in Bartram's Gardens in Philadelphia he finally saw his first live bird, a Ruby-throated Hummingbird.  He then continued to Washington D.C. where he saw large numbers in the gardens of the Capitol.  Gould attempted to return to England with live specimens, but not being aware of the conditions necessary to keep them they only lived for two months at most. 

Gould published: A Monograph of the Trochilidae or Humming Birds with 360 plates (1849-61); The Mammals of Australia (1845-63), Handbook to the Birds of Australia (1865), The Birds of Asia (1850-83), The Birds of Great Britain (1862-73) and The Birds of New Guinea and the adjacent Papuan Islands (1875-88).

A visit to Gould in his old age provided the inspiration for John Everett Millais' painting The Ruling Passion.

The Gould League, founded in Australia in 1909, was named after him. This organization gave many Australians their first introduction to birds, along with more general environmental and ecological education.  One of its major sponsors was the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union, also known as Birds Australia.

In 1976 he was honoured on a postage stamp bearing his portrait issued by Australia Post [1].
His son Charles Gould was notable as geological surveyor.




Henry Constantine Richter

Henry Constantine Richter (7 June 1821–16 March 1902) was an English zoological illustrator who produced a very large number of skillful coloured lithographs of birds and mammals, mainly for the scientific books of the renowned English 19th century ornithologist John Gould.

Many of the original drawings used by Richter as the basis for his coloured lithographs were by Gould's wife, Elizabeth Coxen, produced before her death in 1841 [1] [2].

Richter's reputation was overshadowed by that of his much-celebrated employer. Since it was not customary to acknowledge illustrators alongside authors in the titles of publications, his name was forgotten. But in 1978 his great ability and the extent of his contribution to Gould's work came to light, in the work of the researcher Christine E Jackson [3].

Richter was born in Brompton, London in England on 7 Jun 1821, into an artistic family. His father, Henry James Richter (1772-1857), was a philosopher, painter and engraver who was born in Soho, Middlesex, England to Mary Haigh, the wife of John Augustus Richter, an immigrant from Dresden, Germany - himself an artist and engraver [4].

Richter's mother, Charlotte Sophia Edson (1793-1862), had married his father on 2 May 1818 in Marylebone, Middlesex, England. He was their first child. His birth was followed by that of his sister Antonia Charlotte (1823-1896) and his brother Charles (b.1827). A half-sister - Henrietta Sophia (1814-1896) had already been born to Henry James Richter's first wife, Elizabeth Smith (1787-1816), whom he had married on 9 July 1808, and lost after eight years' marriage [4].

Henry James Richter became a well-respected and popular artist - he was a member, and president (1811-1812), of the Associated Artists in Water Colours, exhibiting frequently. He was also elected to membership of the Society of Painters in Oil and Water Colours. Several of his works are owned by the British Museum [4].

Artistic talent also flourished elsewhere in Richter's family: his half-sister, Henrietta Sophia, became a successful miniature portrait artist, and exhibited at the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts in London, 1842-1849 [5] [6].

The English census returns [7] indicate that the Richters were a close-knit family. For example, in 1851, the 30 year-old Richter was still living with his parents. Henry James Richter did not own a house, but always lived in rented accommodation. In that year, when he was aged 79, his household consisted of: his wife, Charlotte Sophia, his adult son, both of his adult daughters and one servant. This arrangement may have been out of financial necessity as much as family affection - artist and lithographers were paid very little. As related by Jackson (p. 48) [3], one practitioner, GJ Keulmans, wrote of his remuneration: "it has just saved me from starvation and nothing else".

Richter's work with his coloured lithographs was breaking new ground at the time. The technique was labour-intensive and demanded great skill and attention to minute detail.

The University of Tasmanian explains the process that artists use to produce a lithograph from an image, such as a sketch, a drawing or a painting:

Lithographic stones, Museum of the Printing Arts, Leipzig, Germany

Lithography is essentially a chemical process. A drawing is made with a greasy crayon on limestone, then gum arabic and nitrate acid is rubbed into the material, changing its molecular structure so that when ink is applied it adheres to the crayon marks, but not the stone. Fine details are more difficult to achieve, but tonal qualities are easily suggested and it is possible for a drawing to be made directly onto the stone. The result is a more spontaneous impression, with the broad, fluid lines of a crayon and tonal planes producing a much softer or subtler result than that produced by the black and white linear imprint of engravings. - University of Tasmania [8].

John Gould was an experienced taxidermist, using his skill to preserve the skins of birds from his various world-wide expeditions. These skins were used by his artists to guide their illustrations, together with initial sketches made by Gould to indicate his requirements for the exact appearance of the finished images. The London Zoo was opened to the public in 1847 and was a further source of models of birds and animals for Richter's drawings [6].


Richter's earliest published bird illustrations were three plates in the book Genera of birds (1844–1849) by George Robert Gray. The plates depicted the Indian Barn Owl Strix javanica, the head and claws of two other owls, and a member of the pheasant and partridge family, Clapperton's francolin Pternistis clappertoni [9]. His illustrations attracted the favourable attention of ornithologists.

Tasmanian tiger Thylacinus cynocephalus, 1841, Plate 54 of Mammals of Australia, vol.I, J.Gould & H.C. Richter. The thylacine became extinct in 1936.

In 1841 Richter was contacted by the zoologist John Gould, who urgently needed an illustrator, after the death of his wife Elizabeth Coxen (1804-1841), because he had committed to producing various parts of his lavish books on certain dates. The Gould-Richter working relationship lasted for forty years, until Gould died in 1881. Richter created about 3,000 lithographic plates and watercolours for Gould [6]. Other illustrators employed by Gould included Edward Lear, William Matthew Hart and Joseph Wolf, although it was Richter who produced the vast majority of the works during Gould's lifetime. [10].

Yellow-bellied Tit Parus venustulus, between 1850 and 1883, The Birds of Asia. Volume 2, J. Gould & H.C. Richter

Amongst his best known illustrations are those of the male and female thylacine, from Gould's Mammals of Australia (1845–63) - frequently copied since publication [8]. For example, an Australian company Cascade Brewery used the image on the label for one of their brands of beer, in 1987 [11]. Previously, the Tasmanian Government had published a monochromatic reproduction of the same image, in 1934 [12] and, earlier still, the author Louisa Anne Meredith also copied it for Tasmanian Friends and Foes (1881) [8].

In his will, John Gould wrote "I bequeath to my Artist H C Richter a legacy of £100 as a kind remembrance for the purchase of a [mourning] ring or any other article that he may prefer" [2]. He seems to have been unconcerned about the impecunious state of his 60-year-old artist, although Richter had contributed so materially to his own prosperity for over four decades.

After Gould's death Richter gained a small amount of work for Gray's Birds of Asia, and he prepared a plate for Sir Richard Owen's Memoirs on the extinct wingless birds of New Zealand (1878—1879 ) [6]. Work already completed by him was used in Gould's books that were published posthumously, such as Birds of Asia, but new plates for the books were commissioned from William Hart.

Final years[edit]

Lacking a regular income after the death of Gould, Richter became dependant upon his sister, Antonia Charlotte, who had married a wealthy Nottinghamshire farmer with property in Ranby, Henry Francis Noble Champion. Antonia Champion had become a widow in 1854, one year after her marriage, and she inherited her husband's London residence in the Lisson Grove area of London. She continued to live there alone with a servant, and did not marry again.

After John Gould's death Antonia Champion took in her brother and their half-sister Henrietta Sophia Richter. Since Henry James Richter's death in 1857 they had been living in pauper's lodgings in the Lisson Grove area, with their mother whilst she was alive [2].

When Antonia Champion died in 1896, the house passed to Richter, and he stayed there until his death. The probate administration record states that he died 16 March 1902, and that administration occurred 17 April 1902. His estate was valued at just under 840 pounds.

Nothing is known of the life of Richter's younger brother, Charles Richter, beyond a mention in the English Census of 1841, when he was 14 years of age and living with his parents. In 1896, Richter had lost not only his sister, Antonia Charlotte Champion (in January), but also his half-sister, Henrietta Sophia Richter (in October), and since none of them had children, the Richter family line appears to have ended with the passing of Henry Constantine Richter.

Works illustrated[edit]

Jackson (pp. 13-14) [6] lists the 1,600+ hand-coloured plates drawn by Richter as follows:

  • Gray, George Robert, Genera of bird’, 1844-1849, 3 vols.
In Vol I plate XV, Strix javanica HCR del.
In Vol I plate 15, Head and claws of Phodius badicus & Strix flammea HCR del.
In Vol III Francolinus clappertoni HCR del.
  • Gould, John, Birds of Australia, 1840-1848, 600 plates, & Supplement, 1851-1869, 81 plates, HCR after 1841 (when Mrs Gould died) del. & lith.
  • Gould, Joh, Monograph of the Odontophorinae or partridges of America, 1844-50, 32 plates JG & HCR del. & lith.
  • Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, plates drawn and lith. by HCR.
1848 Aves Pl.I Trochilus (Helianthea) eos Gould
Pl.II Trochilus (Heliangelus) mavors Gould
Pl.IV Cinclosoma castaneothorax Gould
1849 Pl. XII Ptiloris Victoriae Gould
1850 (opp. P. 212) Notornis Mantelli Owen
  • Transactions of the Zoological Society of London’’ Plate drawn by HCR.
1849, iii: 379-380 Gould J. On a new species of Genus ‘’Apteryx’’. Plate accompanying text ‘’Apterux owenii’’
  • Gould, John, Monograph of the Trochilidae, or family of humming-birds, 1849-1861.
5 vols, 360 plates, JG & HCR del. et lith.
  • Gould, John, A monograph of the Ramphastidae or family of toucans: Supplement, 1855.
21 plates, JG & HCR, 2nd ed, 1852-1854, 52 plates JG & HCR del. & lith.
  • Gould, John, A monograph of the Trogonidae or family of trogons 2nd ed., 1858-1875.
47 plates, JG & W. Hart & HCR del. & lith.
  • Gould, John, Birds of Asia, 1850-1883, 7 vols. Approx. 500 plates JG & HCR and J. Wolf & HCR.
  • Gould, John, The birds of Great Britain, 1862-1873, 5 vols, 367 plates. Artists JG, HCR & J. Wolf.
  • Owen, Richard, Memoirs on the extinct wingless birds of New Zealand, 1878-1879.
1 large folded plate depicting ‘’Notornis mantelli’’, JG & HCR del & lith.
  • Gould, John, A monograph of the Pittidae, edited by R. B. Sharpe’’, 1880.
10 plates from other Gould titles, including 3 plates JG & HCR del. * lith.


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