Never Mind the Pussy Cat

The Ornithological Art of Edward Lear:

In 1830, visitors to the new Zoological Gardens in London were bemused by a young man—a boy, really—who sat sketching the birds in the Parrot House. He drew the birds as they perched and played, and with the help of a zookeeper named Gosse, measured their wingspans, and the dimensions of their bodies, beaks, and legs. Visitors lingered to watch, and he filled the margins of his paper with caricatures of the people around him.

Edward Lear was working on a startlingly audacious project. Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots was a monograph he planned to publish by subscription in fourteen folios. It was ground-breaking in several ways: Lear was the first ornithological illustrator to publish in the large folio size, and the first to devote an entire book to a single family of birds. His insistence on drawing from life whenever possible was innovative, as was his decision to use lithography.

Lear published the first two folios of the Psittacidae on November 1, 1830.

• Photo from Wiki Commons. Click on photo for very large image.

• Hat tip, Monkey Filter.