ABOUT THE PUBLICATION / EDITOR / ARTIST

John GOULD  (1804–1881) , H. C. Richter (1831-1902)

Gould was in the process of issuing the seven volume Birds of Australia and the Supplement when Elizabeth died and he was fortunate in finding a sympathetic artist and lithographer in H. C. Richter. Over the next seven years Richter used the skins and drawings John and Elizabeth had brought from Australia and produced the majority of the 681 plates. Richter worked with Gould on 32 drawings and plates of American partridges, and 360 drawings and lithographs for Gould’s Hummingbirds.

His best work for Gould is considered to be the Birds of Great Britain. Josef Wolf contributed drawings to this volume but Richter produced over 300 of the 367 plates and shared the lithography with William Hart. The Birds of Great Britain was originally published in 25 parts, two each year from 1862–1873. Each regular part, costing three guineas, provided fifteen handcolored lithographs and accompanying text. It was Gould’s most successful series; 486 subscribers are listed in Gould’s Introduction, published at the conclusion of the series in 1873.

Gould died before completion of The Birds of Asia. This was the final Gould book Richter worked on, contributing some 500 plates. Richter, from a family of renowned artists and artisans, also found time to produce plates for the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London and Sir Richard Owen’s Memoirs on the extinct wingless birds of New Zealand.

William Hart, another of Gould’s artists, was a colourer of plates and he continued this occupation while drawing and lithographing for Gould. He coloured Richter’s plates for the Hummingbirds, using lavish metallic paints. As artist and lithographer he worked on The Birds of Great Britain, The Birds of Asia, The Birds of New Guinea, A monograph of the Pittidae, the 2nd edition of A monograph of the Trogonidae, or the Trogons, and the supplement of A monograph of the Trochilidae, or family of Hummingbirds.

Josef Wolf was one of a group of Continental bird painters to settle in London in the second half of the 19th century and a pioneer in the field of animal illustration. He was an accomplished lithographer but by the time he drew for Gould he had abandoned lithography to devote his time to drawing and painting. He produced water colours for Gould’s Birds of Great Britain but objected to the way the lithographer filled in the backgrounds, and to the over colouring of the finished print. Both Gould and Richter liked a lot of colour, and this is one often made criticism of their work.

Reference:

Taken from preparations by Carol Cantrell as the basis for a talk to be presented to The Australian Museum Society on 21 and 23 April 1998.

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