Catesby's 1771, Vol. 1 Pl. 91, the Pied-Billed Dopchick Hand Colored Engraving

Details

Description

This hand-colored engraving was produced in approx 1771 and measures approximately 20 1/8 by 14 inches.

Catesby brings Pied-billed Grebe … Read more This hand-colored engraving was produced in approx 1771 and measures approximately 20 1/8 by 14 inches.

Catesby brings Pied-billed Grebe together in The Pied-Billed Dopchick. In The Pied-Billed Dopchick, Catesby’s volume 1, plate 91, immediate clarity leaves enough natural detail to reward a slower look at the organisms and their shared setting.

This original hand-colored engraving is volume 1, plate 91 of Mark Catesby’s 1771 edition of The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. In volume 1, plate 91, engraved line and hand-applied color preserve the historical caption and the material character of the antique impression. As volume 1, plate 91, The Pied-Billed Dopchick remains legible as both a natural-history image and a complete historical plate.
Colorway: Black, Blue, Brown, Grey, White
Subjects depicted - Pied-billed Grebe (Podilymbus podiceps)

About the artist:
Mark Catesby: Artist and Naturalist
(1683-1749, English)
Mark Catesby spent years looking at American plants and animals before he attempted to publish them. He first traveled to Virginia in 1712, remaining in the colonies until 1719. A second journey, from 1722 to 1726, took him through Carolina, the Bahama Islands, and other parts of the southeastern Atlantic world. He collected specimens and seeds, made drawings, and sent material to patrons in Britain, among them members of the scientific circle around the Royal Society.

Back in London, Catesby faced the practical difficulty of turning field observations into a book. He learned to etch so that he could reproduce his own drawings and reduced costs by issuing The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands in parts. The completed work contained 220 plates in two volumes. Catesby drew the subjects, etched the copperplates, and hand-colored impressions himself, at least during the early course of publication. Few natural-history books bear the imprint of one person’s labor so directly.

The plates often join an animal with a plant from the same region: a bird on a flowering branch, a frog beneath broad leaves, or a fish turning beside aquatic growth. Catesby deliberately favored what he called a “flat, though exact” manner, believing that elaborate shading could obscure useful information. That directness gives the work its unmistakable character. It was the first fully illustrated survey of the flora and fauna of southeastern North America, and its descriptions were cited extensively by Linnaeus. Long before Audubon, Catesby established a visual language in which species, habitat, and firsthand observation could occupy the same page. See less