A little piece of Victorian bird history
As we enter the migratory season this October, we’ve discovered an amazing treasure for the Purathanam Collection, a beautiful collection of bird prints dating back to the mid-1800s. The moment I saw them I grabbed them thinking they were old Chromolithograph prints..
They had everything I love about nineteenth-century bird art, delicate colours, beautiful birds, that lovely faded paper and a little glimpse of their natural habitat.
But then I started digging.
And I discovered that they weren’t chromolithographs at all.
They were antique hand-coloured wood engravings from the Victorian period, from a remarkable book called A History of British Birds by Rev. F. O. Morris.
And suddenly, the prints became much more interesting.
So, what exactly did I find?
A History of British Birds was first published in monthly parts from 1850, and the complete first edition followed in six volumes between 1851 and 1857.
Each monthly part contained 24 pages of text and four hand-coloured bird illustrations, and cost one shilling. The idea was to bring beautiful natural-history illustrations to a much wider audience rather than keeping them confined to expensive books and private collections. (Benjamin Fawcett)
And people clearly loved it.
The publisher initially planned to print only about 1,000 copies of the first part.
They badly underestimated the demand.
The success was so great that Benjamin Fawcett, the printer behind the illustrations, had to move to larger premises in Driffield only a few months after the first part appeared. (Benjamin Fawcett)
I love finding little details like this because it makes an old book feel less like a museum object and more like something people were genuinely excited about.
The man who wrote the book and the man who made the birds
Rev. Francis Orpen Morris was the naturalist and writer behind the book.
But the beautiful illustrations came from Benjamin Fawcett, a printer and wood engraver working in Driffield, Yorkshire. (Image Below)
And this is where I got completely hooked.
Fawcett engraved the birds onto wood blocks. The images were printed, and then the plates were coloured by hand.
Think about that for a moment.
Someone had to draw the bird.
Someone had to carve those tiny lines into a block of wood.
Someone had to print it.
And then someone had to sit down and carefully add the colour by hand.
The first edition eventually contained 358 hand-coloured plates across six volumes. (Christie’s)
So when we look at one of these little birds today, we’re looking at the work of several different pairs of hands.
And then I noticed the background
Look closely at these prints. See that lovely soft, biscuit-coloured background? When I first saw it, I assumed it was simply what 170 years had done to the paper. But it turns out that, in the early edition, that warm background was actually part of the original painting.
It wasn’t just old paper turning yellow.
That was how the bird was meant to look.
And suddenly I found myself wondering about the Victorian reader who first opened one of these books. They wouldn’t have thought of it as an antique. It was new. Freshly printed.
And these beautifully coloured birds were being brought into their home for the very first time.
These weren’t just birds on a white page
This is probably what I love most about them.
The birds are not simply presented like museum specimens.
Look at the branches, the water, the reeds and the little bits of landscape around them. The bird has a world.
That was important to Morris and Fawcett. They wanted to show birds in their natural surroundings rather than simply as lifeless specimens. (Benjamin Fawcett)
And when I look at them now, that feels strangely familiar.
Because that is still what makes a bird illustration interesting to me.
Not just what bird is this?
But where is it?
What is around it?
What kind of world does it belong to?
Even Queen Victoria took notice
The book became so successful that it caught the attention of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
A bird book being produced in a printing workshop in Driffield, Yorkshire, suddenly finding its way into the world of Queen Victoria.
I think, for any artist and author, being acknowledged by a king or queen or, in modern terms, receiving an award from a Governer or president or any government leaders, would be an extraordinary honour. But this was more than a moment of recognition. The work had caught their attention.
And then something rather extraordinary happened. Queen Victoria permits the work to be dedicated to her. When the complete work was finished, two copies were sent to the Queen, one was placed in the Library at Windsor Castle, while Prince Albert presented the other to the Library at Wellington College.
And there is one more thing I love about these prints
The complete six-volume first edition had 358 birds.
But these individual pages have had their own lives since then.
Some were removed from old books.
Some were framed.
Some were collected.
Some travelled far away from Britain.
And somehow, these particular birds have now found their way to me.
I don’t know who first turned the page and looked at these birds.
I don’t know where they hung, or whose hands held them over all these years.
But I do know that, sometime in the 1850s, someone was looking at the same bird I am looking at now.
And perhaps they paused for exactly the same reason I did.
To look a little closer.
That, for me, is the magic of old things.
They don’t just carry their own history.
They carry little traces of the people who once stopped to look at them.
Some of these Victorian birds are now part of the Purathanam collection, waiting to begin their next journey.
→ Explore the Bird Art Collection
And if this made you curious about how we got from the earliest bird paintings to the beautiful illustrated bird books of the nineteenth century, you can continue the story here: