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Gould was born at Lyme Regis in Dorset on 14 September 1804. His early years there and at Stoke Hill near Surrey gave him the opportunity to develop an interest in his centurys ruling passionnatural history. At the age of 14, taking up his fathers trade, he was apprenticed to the head gardener at Kew. He was a keen amateur ornithologist, and became proficient at egg blowing and taxidermy, selling his specimens to the Boys Museum at Eton. After a period working in the gardens of Ripley Castle in Yorkshire, he returned, aged 20, to London where he abandoned gardening for the increasingly lucrative trade of taxidermy.
In 1827 Gould was appointed Curator and Preserver to the museum of the recently formed Zoological Society of London. His position at the museum gave him valuable experience in working with skins and access to the many newly discovered species sent to the Society by collectors around the world. He may also have met Elizabeth Coxen, a talented artist, at the Societys zoo, which was initially housed with the museum. In 1829 Gould married Elizabeth, beginning a business and artistic partnership that would transform his fortunes. Together they produced their first book on birds, A Century of Birds Hitherto Unfigured from the Himalaya Mountains based on a collection of skins received by the Society. The book was issued in folders between 1830 and 1832 and comprised 80 colour plates featuring hundreds of birds with the illustrations drawn by Elizabeth. From the outset, Gould took great care with his publications and aimed to make them artistic as well as accurate representations of the birds in their natural habitat. He was also meticulous about the descriptions of the specimens and their habits, employing the Linnean system of binomial classification. Unable to find a publisher for this first book, Gould published it himself. Publishing large colour-plate bookswith their reputation for breaking the hearts of their compilers and driving them to bankruptcywas a risky undertaking. All the costs of production were very high, from obtaining the specimens, doing the illustrations, making the plates, printing them and then, in Goulds case, colouring them by hand. Yet, through a combination of meticulous care with the content and the illustrations, the popular appeal of his works, and the fact that among his other talents, Gould was a shrewd and well-organised businessman who chose his staff well, he was financially successful. Earlier books on birds, including Charles Audubons magnificent Birds of America (18271838) relied on engraving and aquatint to reproduce the illustrated plates. Gould was quick to see the potential of the newly popularised technique of lithographic printing, where the illustration is drawn in reverse on the surface of a limestone block, printed in a single colour, and then coloured by hand. Giving a much freer line and particularly suited to reproducing subtle effects of texture and shading, lithography could produce a much more life-like image. Gould himself usually sketched the design for the plates, and until her death Elizabeth produced the finished painting (or key plate), transferred it in reverse onto the stone, and after the prints were run off they were coloured by a team of artists matching their colours to those of the key plate. John Gould supervised all this, and up to his last years wrote the texts to accompany the plates. Given his lack of formal education, he probably had considerable assistance with the textual composition and style from his invaluable and long-serving secretary, Mr. E.C. Prince.
Throughout his career, Gould used the services of a number of artists. Edward Lear began his association with the Goulds by assisting Elizabeth in all her drawings of foregrounds. The Birds of Europe (183237) features the work of both Elizabeth and Edward Lear. Elizabeth died aged only 37 in August 1841 from puerperal fever following the birth of her eighth child (the sixth to survive infancy). Gould did not remarry, but rather threw himselfwith even greater energyinto his work, with The Birds of Australia appearing during the years from 184048. His lifes output was prodigious: over 40 volumes, containing 2999 colour plates. Gould himself was not an artist, and although he designed the plates and carefully supervised their production, after Elizabeths death he entrusted the artistic work to othersnotably H.C. Richter, William Hart and Joseph Wolf. Gould also wrote over 300 papers for the Zoological Society, in which he became a leading member. He never retired, but kept working up until his death on 3 February 1881. The Birds of New Guinea and the Adjacent Papuan Islands on which he was then working, was completed for him by his old friend and colleague, R. Bowdler Sharpe of the British Museum. This final work contains some supplementary Australian birds, as well as the material described in its title.
John Gould is widely regarded as the father of ornithology in Australia, and with good reason. The Birds of Australia is generally acknowledged as the greatest of Goulds eighteen major works. It depicts all the 681 bird varieties then knownmany of them first recorded by Gould himself. 250 sets of the seven-volume work were printed, and even at the outset there were 160 subscribers. Later this number rose to nearly 250, with the edition almost fully subscribed despite the high price of £115 per set. This sum pales beside later prices commanded in the open market, with one set sold in 1989 for $495 000.
A number of books on Australian birds had been published since the establishment of the Colony of New South Wales in 1788, in particular John Lewins Birds of New Holland in 1808, reissued under the title Birds of New South Wales in 1813 and a new enlarged edition in 1822 as A Natural History of the Birds of New South Wales, Collected, Engraved and Faithfully Painted after Nature. None, however, was on the scale imagined by Gould and in 1836 he wrote to the Scottish naturalist Sir William Jardine would not a work on the birds of Australia be interesting? I have a great number of new and interesting specimens to make known and have an idea of making it my next illustrative work. In 1837 Gould had begun to publish Synopsis of the Birds of Australia and the Adjacent Islands, but realised that he did not have enough material. Elizabeths two brothers, Charles and Stephen Coxen, had emigrated to Australia in the early 1830s, and their letters and the strange and unusual specimens they sent back to England fired Gould with the desire to travel and obtain material himself. In May 1838 John and Elizabeth Gould left England with their eldest child Henry, the collector John Gilbert, a nephew and two servants, arriving in Hobart that September. Their two youngest children were left with Elizabeths mother, while the four-year-old went to boarding school. Elizabeth was constantly occupied with doing the drawings for The Birds of Australia and caring for Henry and another son, Franklin Thomas, born in Hobart in 1839 and named for Sir John and Lady Franklin whose hospitality the Goulds enjoyed. Lady Franklin wrote that John Gould was fully conscious of his importance as a [social] lion and that there was no reason why a bird fancier should come all the way to the Antipodes in pursuit of his particular fame, and not think better of himself for it. With the aid of John Gilbert, who remained in Australia on a retainer of £100 plus expenses, and two local men, Natty and Jemmy, John Gould collected 800 bird specimens, 70 quadrupeds and the nests and eggs of more than 70 species of birds and the skeletons of all the principal forms, making notes on them and their habitat and incidentally discovering the budgerigar, both as a dinner dish (he was reputed to enjoy eating large numbers of them) and as a pet. He took several pairs back to England in 1840 where they became very popular.
In addition to the 84 plates Elizabeth produced for The Birds of Australia, Edward Lear contributed one, Waterhouse Hawkins contributed one and the remaining 595 plates were produced by H.C. Richter. Subscribers to The Birds of Australia had to wait over eight years (eighteen for the Supplement) before they could bind the seven volumes, as the titles, lists of plates and introduction were delivered with the last of the plates.
The National Library is fortunate to have three full sets of the first edition of The Birds of Australia in its' collections. One copy was acquired by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library in 1907. A second copy came to the Library with the Ferguson Collection (obtained 193769) in which Goulds The Birds of Australia (19401948) was one item among 34,000the largest private collection in the Librarys possession. The third copy was acquired in 1939 when the distinguished ornithologist Mr Gregory Macalister Mathews donated his collection of books, pamphlets, reprints, manuscripts and pictorial material to the National Library. The Mathews Collection is the result of 20 years of work and is considered to be the finest collection of material relating to the study of Australian birds. In the Librarys Pictorial Collection there are a number of the key plates from which the colourists of Goulds The Birds of Australia worked and an album of original drawings and paintings. Although these original artworks are often annotated as being by John Gould, this attribution is probably not reliable in most cases. An exception is the Euphema splendida Gould which illustrates this page. Michelle Hetherington
Remarkable Occurrences: The National Library of Australias First
100 Years, 19012001 |
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