sketcher, publisher and natural history collector, was born at Lyme Regis in Dorset on 14 September 1804, son of John Gould, a gardener in the Royal Gardens at Windsor. At 14 Gould also began training in gardening and later gained skill in taxidermy, being appointed curator and preserver to the Zoological Society’s museum in 1827. In 1829 he married Elizabeth Coxen ( Elizabeth Gould ), a lady of refined accomplishments from an old Kentish family. In 1830 31 he published the first of his magnificent series of ornithological works, A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains , for which the drawings were placed on the stone by Elizabeth, almost certainly from preliminary sketches by John.
All Gould’s major works were illustrated with hand-coloured lithographs. For probably almost all of these Gould, whose artistry and draughtsmanship though not established by training or finely polished was nevertheless real, supplied rough sketches, many showing marked vitality. Because the genesis, inspiration and guiding control were entirely his, the plates are appropriately called 'Gould prints’ even though the finished drawings and their transfer to the lithographic stones were done by his wife and his artist-employees. Change and development in the plates over a long period can be readily discerned, but a basic 'Gould plate’ style remains firmly established throughout.
John and Elizabeth Gould visited Australia in 1838 40. During this time Elizabeth made many drawings of birds, mammals and plants for use in his proposed Australian books while John carried out the collection and observation of birds and mammals in the field. After returning to England he sustained a great loss in the untimely death of his wife in 1841. In The Birds of Australia (1840 48) and Supplement (1869), perhaps John Gould’s greatest personal enterprise and ornithological achievement, there are 681 hand-coloured lithographs, but only 84 carry Elizabeth Gould’s name in the legend, the great majority having been done by Richter, with one by Lear and one by Hawkins. Hart and Wolf were also employed as artists.
Plates from broken sets of this and many of Gould’s other major works have become popularly collected items for both pleasure and investment. Although lacking the energy and dramatic power of Audubon’s prints (with which they are inevitably compared) and though rather mundane in their poorer examples, Gould plates (prints) at their best justify their established reputation in their restrained charm and appeal to the formal in preference to the flamboyant. They are reasonably accurate and finely produced examples of both the nineteenth-century natural history plate and the lithograph, hand-coloured with watercolour of clarity and softness.
The magnitude of Gould’s output is outstanding. He produced 15 monumental works numbering over 40 imperial folio volumes, including those on Australian mammals. The number of individual hand-coloured plates for all sets of the major works issued totalled hundreds of thousands. The Birds of Great Britain (1862 73) in five volumes may be regarded as his finest work. Its plates portray the birds of his native land with devotion, and their atmosphere captures an essential spirit in the British tradition of natural history.
Gould’s contribution to natural history art lay in the characteristic vigour of his entrepreneurial control and guidance no less than in the vitality of his preliminary sketches, and, finally, in the magnitude of his production of the lithographic fine print in ornithology, reflecting the age and recording the beauty of both British and exotic species.
- Writers:
- McEvey, Allan
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 1989
