Artist:
William Matthew Hart (1830 - 1881)
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Artist:
William Matthew Hart (1830 - 1881)
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Description:
Rare Gould size, lithograph of the Spotted Catbird, from Richard Bowdler Sharpe, A Monograph of the Paradisae, or Birds of Paradise, and Ptilonorhynchidae or Bowerbirds.
As the great scholar, Sacheverell Sitwell states in describing Sharpe’s monograph, in his Fine Bird Books 1700-1900; “A continuation of Gould’s Birds of New Guinea, which was itself completed by Bowdler Sharpe.”
As John Gould had died prior to the completion of what was to be his final work, The Birds of New Guinea, and the Adjacent Papuan Islands, Including many New Species Recently Discovered in Australia, it was left to Richard Bowdler Sharpe of the British Museum to complete it. Sharpe then followed that great work by producing A Monograph of the Paradisae, or Birds of Paradise, and Ptilonorhynchidae or Bowerbirds which he saw as the completion of not only John Gould’s Birds of New Guinea but Gould’s Birds of Australia. Sharpe used William Hart to draw and lithograph the plates as he had done in the Birds of New Guinea.
John Gould had included a lithograph of the Spotted Catbird in his Birds of New Guinea (plate 719) which had been first described 1875 by the Australian ornithologist, Edward Pierson Ramsay. It was drawn and lithographed by William Hart but depicted as a single bird. In this lithograph Sharpe has Hart add a female on her nest.
Common name: Spotted Catbird
Modern binomial name: Ailuroedus maculosus
First described: Ramsay 1875
Distribution: QLD
Richard Bowdler Sharpe, A Monograph of the Paradisae, or Birds of Paradise, and Ptilonorhynchidae or Bowerbirds.
References: Sitwell p.142
Biography:
William Matthew Hart (1830-1908)
Has was a brilliant English bird illustrator and lithographer who worked for John Gould for most of his professional career. He began working for Gould in 1851, beginning an association that was to last thirty years. Early during this period he the lithographs for Gould’s work on hummingbirds, as well as working on The Birds of Great Britain with Henry Constantine Richter. By 1870 Hart had become Gould’s chief artist and lithographer and after Gould’s death in 1881, Hart was employed by Richard Bowdler-Sharpe of the British Museum to complete Gould’s work on the birds of New Guinea and to produce illustrations for Sharpe’s monograph on the birds-of-paradise.
$A 110
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