Special Collections

Book of the Month, February 2012

The Natural History of Parrots
Prideaux Selby; ill. by Edward Lear
Edinburgh: W.H. Lizars, 1836
[D.-L.L.] Vo [Jardine]

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the landscape painter and writer Edward Lear, who was born in London in 1812, the twentieth of twenty-one children of Jeremiah and Ann Lear. Educated at home by his mother and sister, Lear began his career as an artist at the age of fifteen, serving an unofficial apprenticeship with the ornithologist Prideaux Selby. Between 1830 and 1832 Lear published Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots, a work which was pioneering in several respects. It was the first such work devoted to a single family of bird, the first in large format with lithographic illustrations, and the first to reproduce birds direct from nature (Lear drew from life at the gardens of the Zoological Society of London). Lear’s Illustrations received immediate acclaim but his subscribers’ slowness in paying for the parts forced Lear to abandon the project and seek new employment.

Over the next five years Lear contributed illustrations to Sir William Jardine’s series ‘The Naturalist’s Library’. The series included this volume on parrots, published in 1836, which, the advertisement boasts, contains ‘the greatest combination of talent, both in the literary department, by … Mr Selby, and in the beautiful and interesting illustrations by Mr Lear, from whose pencil they have, with only two exceptions, been taken’. Lear’s drawings were engraved for the volume by William Lizars, who engraved the plates for Audubon’s Birds of America.

Lear’s ability to capture both anatomical accuracy and a bird’s personality means that he is considered by many to be England’s leading ornithological draughtsman. The quality of his work led to a commission to record the private menagerie of Lord Stanley, at Knowsley near Liverpool, and it was in Stanley’s jovial country house that Lear produced many of the original drawings and verses for his famous A Book of Nonsense.

This item comes from the Durning-Lawrence Library which includes another volume within ‘The Naturalist’s Library’ illustrated by Lear: The Natural History of Pigeons (1835).

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