After Joseph Wolf & J Smit Two Coloured Lithographs 19th Century

After Joseph Wolf & J Smit Two coloured lithographs 19th century, highly decorative and beautifully framed.

A pair titled 'King Bird of Paradise' and 'Magnificent Bird of Paradise' printed by M &N Hanhart c1870

Published by Daniel Giraud Elliot was one of the most important American ornithologists and naturalists of the nineteenth century. Despite his importance and stature, there is remarkably little recorded about his life’s details other than what he wrote and spoke about his professional life in 1914, in an unpublished reminiscence and an address to the Linnean Society of New York. Elliot’s professional accomplishments were anything but obscure, however. He was a scientific founder of the American Museum of Natural History in 1869, and his personal collection of North American birds included the first specimens accessioned into the Museum. Elliot made numerous trips across the globe for study and collecting, generally being away for multiple years at a time, with his longest absence being a decade. Based on these travels, he published hundreds of papers, including multiple folio-size monographs on groups of mammals and birds.

Even today, with all of the excellent methods of colour reproduction available, the beauty of hand-colouring cannot be equalled.Joseph Wolf is pre-eminent among the ornithological artists of the day: he was the first bird artist to fully understand and use the new freedom of style that lithography allowed. The lithographic crayon suited Wolf's drawing style, transforming his soft expressive lines and subtle suggestions of movement into a printable image. His work set a new standard in life-like representations and Wolf's skill at capturing the essential character of his subjects also breathed life into the stiff "bird on a perch" portrayals so characteristic of bird art of the day. The plates in Elliot's Monograph of the... Birds of Paradise, "almost as magnificent as the birds they portray, were the fruits of Elliot's considerable wealth, Wolf's great artistry and both men's profound knowledge and love of birds" (Dance). Elliot writes in the preface "The drawings of Mr. Wolf will, I am sure, receive the admiration of those who see them; for, like all that artist's productions, they cannot be surpassed, if equalled, at the present time. Mr. J. Smit has lithographed the drawings with his usual conscientious fidelity, and in his share of the work has left me nothing to desire..

59 x 45 cms Image

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