natural history painter and lithographer, was born in Ramsgate, daughter of Nicholas Coxen, descended from an old Kentish family with military and naval connections. She was a governess in London before her marriage to John Gould in January 1829. She taught French, Latin and music and presumably had also received some formal tuition in drawing and painting as part of an education then considered appropriate for ladies. Reputedly of sweet disposition, she was a devoted wife to Gould, the curator and preserver at the Zoological Society’s museum. Gould began his ornithological publications with A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains (1830-31) and, it is said, announced to his wife when she asked who would draw the plates on stone, 'Why, you, of course!’ Thus began a large series of hand-coloured lithographs drawn by Elizabeth Gould for John Gould’s ornithological works. Elizabeth Gould accompanied her husband to Australia in 1838 with their son Henry , leaving their three other children in England. A fifth child, Franklin, was born in Van Diemen’s Land and her sixth child, a daughter, was born after their return to England in 1840, not long before she died from puerperal fever, on 15 August 1841.
During the Australian visit Elizabeth made a large number of drawings of plants and birds to assist her in producing the final lithographs for The Birds of Australia (1840-48) and Supplement (1869). However, only 84 of the 681 plates in The Birds of Australia carry her name in the legend due to her untimely death. Her major work was done in connection with A Century of Birds (a total of 80 plates), The Birds of Europe (448 plates), Toucans (34), Trogons (36) and Icones Avium (18) since her untimely death from puerperal fever in 1841 prevented her from producing plates for the Partridges (32), Humming Birds (418), Birds of Asia (530), Birds of Great Britain (367) and Birds of New Guinea (320) that were still to come and for which other artists were employed.
To what extent Elizabeth Gould initially benefited artistically from acquaintance with the bird paintings of Edward Lear – who was employed by Gould – is debatable. Her style, understandably tentative at first, became more confident with experience. The delicate and graceful plate of The Budgerygah and the original drawing of the Boobook Owl, for example, both for The Birds of Australia , show a marked advance over plates for A Century of Birds . Her stilts and some smaller parrots and finches in the former are very appealing. Also attributed to her hand are the excellent lithographed heads of birds in the Synopsis of 1837-38 and the fifty plates of birds in Darwin’s The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle … Part III Birds (1841).
Readily befriended in Tasmania by Lady Franklin, the Governor’s wife, Elizabeth Gould was a warm and gentle person, as revealed by her letters home. She asked her mother, for example, to 'Say everything that is kind to everybody on our part’, and she showed a pioneering fortitude in her separation from her children in an age of delayed mail and slow travel, writing: 'Oh my dear Mother, how happy shall I be if permitted to see you once more and my dear children’ – and again:
I sigh and think if I could but see old England again, and the dear, dear treasures it contains, I would contentedly sit down at my working table and stroke, stroke away to the end of the chapter, that is health permitting.
When The Times praised John Gould posthumously as a 'true priest of Nature’, Blanchard Jerrold wrote from the Reform Club to remind readers that the priest 'was assisted by a…priestess’ of 'artistic aptitude and courageous devotion’. In her memory Gould named Erythura (Amadina) gouldiae , the beautiful Gouldian Finch. In her best work Elizabeth contributed a lasting elegance and charm to the character of the Gould print. She stands as the first lady of Australian bird painting and lithography.
- Writers:
- McEvey, Allan
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 1989
