Birds Drawn for John Gould by Edward Lear
Edward Lear was an ornithological artist with few equals. This magnificent ‘imperial folio’ edition is a facsimile of David Attenborough’s unique collection of Lear’s work for the naturalist John Gould. Limited to 780 numbered copies, each signed by David Attenborough. Order now for delivery May 2013.
Published price:
$1595.00
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Copies are bound in response to orders.
Edward Lear had an eye for landscapes and an ear for rhyme, but it was neither as a travel painter nor as a writer of comic verse that he first displayed his prolific talent. Between 1832 – when he was just 20 – and 1838, Lear created 80 bird portraits for the naturalist and entrepreneur John Gould. For many, they are the world’s finest ornithological illustrations. The plates were produced using the fledgling art of lithography and coloured by hand. They featured in Gould’s celebrated books, intermingled with the work of other, often less accomplished artists.
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David Attenborough first saw one of Lear’s plates in the 1950s, and was so struck by its precision and grace that he determined to collect them all. When the collection was complete, he had them bound in an original 19th-century leather binding case. Now, to celebrate the bicentenary of Lear’s birth, Attenborough has kindly allowed us to reproduce the entire volume in facsimile. He has also written a superb introduction, especially for this limited edition, and signed each copy.
Edward Lear and John Gould
Lear was born in Highgate, London, in 1812. As the 20th child of a bankrupt and widowed businessman, he was obliged to work from a young age. His elder sister Ann encouraged him to take up painting, and his talent soon became a source of income. As well as painting ladies' fans and providing medical drawings for local hospitals, Lear worked as an assistant to Prideaux Selby, an ornithologist and Fellow of the Zoological Society. Perhaps through this connection, he was commissioned to produce some illustrations for the Society, which were reproduced by engraving. It was a long-established but imprecise method, soon to be outmoded by the subtler technique of lithography, whose leading exponent, Charles Hullmandel, had a studio near the Society’s gardens.
In early lithography, the image was drawn onto a smooth stone using an oil-based medium such as a wax crayon, followed by an aqueous solution of gum arabic. When the ink was applied, it was repelled by the gum arabic but sank into the areas marked by the crayon. Finally, a press was used to transfer the ink to paper. For the young Lear, this new technique enabled an exciting publishing venture: meticulously rendered bird portraits, reproduced with their detail intact and issued to subscribers in groups of plates. John James Audubon had undertaken a similar project some years earlier, but was limited to engraving from copper plates, which blunted the finer strokes of the painter’s brush.
Taking the parrot family as his subject, Lear worked tirelessly, petitioning his contacts at the Society for access to specimens, carrying heavy lithographic blocks between his lodgings and Hullmandel’s studio, and sending out prospectuses to potential subscribers. But the returns were too low to support the project, and he was forced to give up. John Gould – ten years older with a published book of bird plates already to his name – offered to complete the work. He never did, but Lear’s talent for ornithological illustration became central to his ambitious publishing plans. Over the six years that followed, Lear’s work appeared in four spectacular ‘imperial folio’ volumes published by Gould.
A spectacular body of work
In his introduction to this beautiful facsimile, David Attenborough explores the early development of Lear’s artistry, his partnership with Gould, and the innovation and flair that helped to make these bird prints exceptional. Attenborough’s knowledge and enthusiasm make this the perfect introductory text – a fascinating insight into the creativity and ambition of two very different individuals, and the technical advances that helped fuel their ventures.
A message from David Attenborough
I first became aware of Edward Lear’s bird plates in 1954. I had recently returned from filming a collecting expedition in Guyana. We brought back hummingbirds, anacondas, caiman and marmosets, but I hankered after pictures of some of the spectacular birds which I had just seen for the first time in the wild. Many of these are depicted in the prints issued by the 19th-century naturalist and publisher John Gould. Among the first I found was one of a Toco Toucan. It was a particularly dramatic composition, and it was signed very emphatically E. Lear. It was then that I discovered that the poet whose nonsense verses I had loved as a child was also a superbly accomplished ornithological artist. From then on, I kept an eye out for more of the prints that he produced for Gould, and this became a decades-long endeavour to collect them all – a total of 80 lithographed plates, to which was later added an original drawing.
Lear’s bird plates, to my eyes at least, rank among the finest of their kind, and I was pleased to have collected them all into a single volume, separated from works by lesser talents. And to know that they will now be available to a broader audience, published together for the first time, is immensely rewarding. What’s more, the work undertaken by The Folio Society to reproduce not only the prints, but even an original 19th-century binding, has produced an edition worthy of this great artist. Bound in full leather, elaborately gold-blocked, it is a truly remarkable reproduction. There could hardly be a better celebration of Lear’s 200th anniversary.
I am thrilled that what began as a private collection has been reproduced for a wider readership – and in a way that has so authentically captured the beauty of the original.
Each copy comes with a beautiful print of the majestic Eagle Owl (unframed).
David Attenborough
Read more about the life and work of Edward Lear
Delivery of limited editions may take longer than standard editions. Please contact us for more information.
To recreate Attenborough’s 19th-century binding, we first commissioned an artist to draw sections of the intricate artwork decorating the spine and front and back boards. By repeating these sections, we were able to create a complete layout of the binding design – scrupulously accurate to ensure
proper alignment in the blocked and bound leather. The tannery dyed the leather to match the dark green of the original binding, and it was plated to create the smooth surface required for the delicate gold blocking.
Once plated and blocked, the leather was wrapped around the boards with the utmost
precision and the raised bands on the spine were cased in by hand. The motif on the inside corner of each board was hand-stamped using a brass engraved with a design matching the original.
The original binding included hand-marbled endpapers of the ‘Turkish Spot’ variety. We asked Jemma Lewis, whose work also features in our Letterpress Shakespeare series, to recreate them. Using high-quality short-grain paper and gouache paint, Jemma experimented until she had replicated the pattern, using a comb called a stylus to form the swirls of colour with their red and yellow veins. By repeating this process, she created two endpapers for each copy of the book. All follow the original design, but no two are quite alike. From the shuffled pages with gilded top edges, to the texture and shade of the goatskin leather binding, this reproduction captures the elegant aesthetic of the imposing 19th-century bird books in which Lear’s work originally appeared. Each copy also contains a tipped-in limitation certificate, printed letterpress and signed by David Attenborough.
- • Limited to 780 numbered copies.
- • Printed on matt-coated wove paper. Set in Bodoni.
- • 80 hand-coloured lithographs and one additional drawing in high-quality reproduction.
- • Introduction by David Attenborough.
- • Limited edition certificate, printed letterpress, signed by David Attenborough.
- • Bound in full goatskin leather with gold blocking on front, back, spine and inside edges.
- • Shuffled pages, gilded top edge.
- • Hand-marbled ‘Turkish Spot’ endpapers.
- • 184 pages.
- • ‘Imperial folio’ format measures 21¼" x 14½".
- • Presented in a buckram-bound solander box along with a beautiful print of the majestic Eagle Owl (unframed).
Dear Reader
The idea for this limited edition came when I visited David Attenborough in the autumn of 2010. We were discussing the Folio edition of Sharpe’s Birds of Paradise, for which David had written a foreword. As we sat in the museum room at his house – surrounded by African masks and cabinets displaying artefacts from all over the world – I noticed among a collection of handsome folio volumes a title which was both unfamiliar and intriguing: Birds Drawn for John Gould in the upper panel of the spine, and Edward Lear beneath. Intriguing because, while I knew that Lear had painted birds for Gould’s famous publications, I had never seen them gathered together and presented under the artist’s name. I asked David about the origins of this curious volume.
‘Of course you haven’t heard of it,’ he replied, ‘because it’s the only copy – I collected them myself.’ He pulled the book down from its shelf and we turned the pages, admiring one glorious hand-coloured plate after another. He told me how he first came upon a Lear bird plate in the 1950s, and was inspired to collect the remaining prints. Because they were published in various different volumes, many of which had been dismantled by booksellers to obtain prints for individual sale, the prints were not easy to find. When he eventually completed the collection, he printed a unique title page and a list of plates in the style of the original volumes, and found a binding case from the Gould era in which to rebind them. The illusion was perfect. Much impressed, I cautiously suggested the idea of publishing a limited edition facsimile. David said that he would be delighted for us to do so, and would write an introduction, telling the whole story – and so the fascinating, and sometimes challenging, process of recreating this unique book began.
The project took on a greater urgency when we noted that 2012 would be the bicentenary of Lear’s birth. Determined to make this a commemorative edition, we transported the original volume – which David kindly loaned to us for six months – to a photographer without delay. Here, after a series of trials, we gained a set of images that accurately captured the ranging tones of each print, from the pale hues of background skies, to the iridescent blacks of the birds’ plumage. The repro house worked on the photographs and produced proof after proof until they were satisfied that the images were as close to the originals as possible. Finally the plates were printed on a stock closely matched to the 19th-century paper of the originals, which is perfectly matt, unlike the paper used in most of today’s art books.
The binding case of the original volume is a classic piece of early 19th-century bookbinding, elaborately hand-tooled with the most intricate patterns. The idea of replicating this was daunting in the extreme, so we brought together a group of craftsmen – two leather-tanners, a specialist gold-blocker, a hand-marbler and two binders – to examine how it might be done, if indeed it could be done at all. The leather-tanners shared their specialised expertise, and explained how, despite the difference in tanning methods over two centuries, they could match the elegant dark-green to which David’s binding – presumably once black – had mellowed. They also pointed out that the original binding, which we had assumed was from a single skin, was cunningly jointed from two skins – another feature which we have replicated.
The complexity of the gold tooling was particularly problematic. Conventional blocking techniques could not be employed because the edges and turn-ins of the binding are blocked in addition to the spine and boards. Between them, the gold-blockers and binders came up with a hybrid solution which, as far as I am aware, has never been employed before. It involved blocking the entire design in a single pass, onto leather panels already attached to their boards (to keep them rigid) but not turned in around the edges. The edges were supported with additional pieces of board while the massive brass was pressed into place. It seemed quite incredible to me that such a detailed design could be produced in this way, but we agreed to give it a try. Next we turned to the marble endpapers. Marbler Jemma Lewis recognised the pattern at once as ‘Turkish Spot’, and was confident that she could produce an effect in the style of the original, though of course each handmade endpaper would vary slightly from the next.
Several months and numerous trials later, we finally received a finished book and were honestly rather amazed at what had been achieved. There had indeed been times in which I doubted that we could reproduce this singular collection with the accuracy and elegance that it deserved – but my doubts were unfounded. All credit is due to the craftsmen who, through their dedication and skill, made this spectacular edition possible.
Yours sincerely
Joe Whitlock Blundell
Production Director
P. S. Birds Drawn for John Gould by Edward Lear is limited to just 780 copies, each signed by David Attenborough. We recommend that you order without delay to secure your copy.
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Reviews
Review by tob21@bath.ac.uk on 5th Dec 2012
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"fantastic bookbinding is something to be proud of well done everybody concerned "
Review by MKenny on 30th Nov 2012
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"I received my copy of Edward Lear’s drawings and as always with FS limited editions it was packaged to prevent any shipping damage. The Solander box is also very sturdy and nicely labeled. The bo..." [read more]
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