Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised.
John Nichols was an English printer, author and antiquary. He is remembered as an influential editor of the Gentleman's Magazine for nearly 40 years; author of a monumental county history of Leicestershire; author of two compendia of biographical material relating to his literary contemporaries; and as one of the agents behind the first complete publication of Domesday Book in 1783.
George Cruikshank or Cruickshank was a British caricaturist and book illustrator, praised as the "modern Hogarth" during his life. His book illustrations for his friend Charles Dickens, and many other authors, reached an international audience.
John Gould was an English ornithologist who published monographs on birds, illustrated by plates produced by his wife, Elizabeth Gould, and several other artists, including Edward Lear, Henry Constantine Richter, Joseph Wolf and William Matthew Hart. He has been considered the father of bird study in Australia and the Gould League in Australia is 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.
Edward Smith-Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby, KG, of Knowsley Hall in Lancashire, was a politician, peer, landowner, builder, farmer, art collector and naturalist. He was the patron of the writer Edward Lear.
George Edwards was an English naturalist and ornithologist, known as the "father of British ornithology".
Sir William Jardine, 7th Baronet of Applegarth FRS FRSE FLS FSA was a Scottish naturalist. He is known for his editing of a long series of natural history books, The Naturalist's Library.
Richard Bowdler Sharpe was an English zoologist and ornithologist who worked as curator of the bird collection at the British Museum of natural history. In the course of his career he published several monographs on bird groups and produced a multi-volume catalogue of the specimens in the collection of the museum. He described many new species of bird and also has had species named in his honour by other ornithologists including Sharpe's longclaw and Sharpe's starling.
Johannes Gerardus Keulemans was a Dutch bird illustrator. For most of his life he lived and worked in England, illustrating many of the best-known ornithology books of the nineteenth century.
Henry Constantine Richter 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.
William Chapman Hewitson was a British naturalist. A wealthy collector, Hewitson was particularly devoted to Coleoptera (beetles) and Lepidoptera and, also, to birds' nests and eggs. His collection of butterflies, collected by him as well as purchased from travellers throughout the world, was one of the largest and most important of his time. He contributed to and published many works on entomology and ornithology and was an accomplished scientific illustrator.
Archibald James Campbell was an Australian civil servant in the Victorian government Customs Service. However, his international reputation rests on his expertise as an amateur ornithologist, naturalist, and photographer.
The Birds of America is a book by naturalist and painter John James Audubon, containing illustrations of a wide variety of birds of the United States. It was first published as a series in sections between 1827 and 1838, in Edinburgh and London. Not all of the specimens illustrated in the work were collected by Audubon himself; some were sent to him by John Kirk Townsend, who had collected them on Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth's 1834 expedition with Thomas Nuttall.
Elizabeth Gould, née Coxen (1804—1841), was a British artist and illustrator at the forefront of the natural history movement. Elizabeth traveled and worked alongside her husband, naturalist and author John Gould. She produced illustrations and lithographs for ornithological works, including plates in Darwin's The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle and the Goulds' seminal work The Birds of Australia. In total, Elizabeth is accredited to at least 650 works.
The Mammals of Australia is a three-volume work written and published by John Gould between 1845–63. It contains 182 illustrations by the author and its artist H. C. Richter. It was intended to be a complete survey of the novel species of mammals, such as the marsupials, discovered in the colonies of Australia.
The Handbook to the Birds of Australia is a two-volume work published in London in 1865 by the author John Gould. It was published in octavo format, containing some 1290 pages, bound in green cloth with gilt lyrebirds on the front covers and with decorated gilt spines. The two volumes are separately paginated and include no illustrations. It is essentially a revision and update of the text originally published with Gould's monumental illustrated folio The Birds of Australia, which was published in seven volumes between 1840 and 1848. The author says in his Preface:
”Nearly twenty years have elapsed since my folio work on the Birds of Australia was completed. During that period many new species have been discovered, and much additional information acquired respecting those comprised therein; consequently it appeared to me that a careful résumé of the entire subject would be acceptable to the possessors of the former edition, as well as to the many persons in Australia who are now turning their attention to the ornithology of the country in which they are resident. Indeed I have been assured that such a work is greatly needed to enable the explorer during his journeyings, or the student in his quiet home, to identify the species that may come under his notice, and as a means by which the curators of the museums now established in the various colonies may arrange and name the collections intrusted to their charge. With these views the present Handbook has been prepared.”
The Birds of Australia is a 12-volume ornithological handbook covering the birds of Australia. It was the second of three monumental illustrated works dealing with the avifauna of the continent and was published midway between the other two, the first being Gould's identically titled The Birds of Australia (1840-1848), and the third the Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds (1990-2006).
Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots is an 1832 book containing 42 hand-coloured lithographs by Edward Lear. He produced 175 copies for sale to subscribers as a part-publication, which were later bound as a book. Lear started painting parrots in 1830 when he was 18 years old, and to get material for his book he studied live birds at the London Zoo and in private collections. The latter included those of Edward Smith Stanley, later 13th Earl of Derby, who had a large menagerie at Knowsley Hall, and Benjamin Leadbeater, a taxidermist and trader in specimens. Lear drew onto lithographic plates for printing by Charles Joseph Hullmandel, who was known for the quality of his reproductions of fine art.
A History of the Birds of Europe, Including all the Species Inhabiting the Western Palearctic Region is a nine-volume ornithological book published in parts between 1871 and 1896. It was mainly written by Henry Eeles Dresser, although Richard Bowdler Sharpe co-authored the earlier volumes. It describes all the bird species reliably recorded in the wild in Europe and adjacent geographical areas with similar fauna, giving their worldwide distribution, variations in appearance and migratory movements.
A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains was an ornithological book published by John Gould between 1830 & 1832.
