This year for Color Our Collections, we’ve produced a coloring book with illustrations from books that represent the evolution of the art of printing. This week on our blog, we’ll explore the books featured in the coloring book and the printing techniques used for the illustrations.

You can download our 2017 Color Our Collections coloring book here.

Learn more about Color Our Collections here.

The Art of Lithography

The process of lithography was first discovered by a German actor and playwright, Alois Senefelder, in 1796. It was used to varying degrees in the early 19th century, but became increasingly popular from the mid-19th century onward. By the 1880s, it was used widely for printing magazines and advertising.

In the lithographic process, the image is drawn onto a stone with a grease-based ink or crayon. The stone is then processed using a gum Arabic and nitric acid solution. The solution chemically separates the image and non-image areas, making the non-image areas water-receptive and the image areas water repellent. Once the stone has been processed, it is kept damp and an oil-based ink is applied. The ink is repelled by the damp non-image areas and sticks to the fixed image areas. The ink can then be transferred to a sheet of paper using a printing press.

This video from the Minneapolis Institute of Art demonstrates the lithographic process:

Gould’s Australian Bird Lithographs

John Gould was an English ornithologist and bird artist who is famous for producing several magnificently-illustrated monographs on birds. One such work is The Birds of Australia, which was originally issued in 36 parts between 1840-48. Taken together, the title consists of 7 folio-sized volumes plus a supplement. It described all of the 681 Australian bird species then known, many of which were scientifically described for the first time. This title was digitized in BHL by Smithsonian Libraries.

Illustration by John Gould and H.C. Richter. Gould, John. The Birds of Australia. v. 2 (1848). http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/48200584. Digitized by Smithsonian Libraries.

Gould’s original interest in Australian birds was sparked when his two brothers-in-law, Charles and Stephen Coxen, who had emigrated to Australia, sent him some specimens. Many of these he described in the 1837-38 work A synopsis of the birds of Australia, and the adjacent islands (Digitized in BHL by Museums Victoria).

In 1838, Gould, his wife Elizabeth, their eldest son, their nephew, Gould’s assistant John Gilbert, and two servants set sail for Australia so that Gould could undertake a more extensive work on Australian birds. During the 27 months that they were in Australia, Gould and his assistant collected some 800 bird and 70 quadruped specimens. Some 300 of these at the time were deemed new-to-science, although some of these are now recognized as subspecies.

Illustration by John Gould and Elizabeth Gould. Gould, John. The Birds of Australia. v. 3 (1848). http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/48285735. Digitized by Smithsonian Libraries.

After returning to England, work began on the publication. The title’s crowning achievement is the beautiful lithographic illustrations. These were based on rough sketches by Gould that were worked up into paintings that were then reproduced through the process of lithography. The plates were printed in a single color by the firm of Hullmandel and Walton and then hand colored by a Mr. Bayfield.

Illustration by John Gould and H.C. Richter. Gould, John. The Birds of Australia. v. 5 (1848). http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/48400938. Digitized by Smithsonian Libraries.

John’s wife Elizabeth, who produced most of the lithographs for John’s earlier works, executed 84 of the plates in this title. Sadly, she died of puerperal fever a year after returning to England. John enlisted Henry Constantine Richter to produce most of the remaining illustrations, although Edward Lear and Waterhouse Hawkins also contributed an illustration each. The first seven volumes were completed in 1848, but additional parts were later produced to form a supplementary volume to describe additional new species.

References

• American Printing History Association. History of Printing Timeline. https://printinghistory.org/timeline/.
• Leicester Print Workshop. A Step-by-Step Guide to Stone Lithography. http://www.leicesterprintworkshop.com/printmaking/step_by_step_guide_to_stone_lithography/.
• The University of Glasgow. Library Special Collections Department. Book of the Month: The Birds of Australia. http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/july2005.html.

Beauty can be too much for words. So it is with the charm of what many consider the loveliest of the world’s birds, the hummingbirds: Overcome by the dazzling colors of those first tiny skins, early European naturalists reached to the limits of their vocabularies to describe them. The result, nearly five centuries after the first specimens were brought back from a then truly New World, is a large set of remarkably evocative names, hillstars and woodstars, helmetcrests and plumeleteers, jacobins and incas, metaltails and thornbills, emeralds and sapphires and topazes and rubies.

The birds, of course, are every bit as fantastic as their monikers. The 1907 edition of The Americana, the authoritative North American encyclopedia of its day, gave its readers a glimpse into the vast variety of color and adornment so typical of this large family, from the Horned Sungem to the Hyacinth Visorbearer. One of the thirteen birds shown on this appealing plate, however, is conspicuously absent from any modern list of hummingbirds: the extraordinarily colored Harlequin Hummingbird.

That bird was first made known to science a century and a quarter before it was depicted in The Americana. In 1782, John Latham described his new species from a specimen in the collections of the British Museum.

Unfortunately, Latham notes, that unique skin had “no history annexed to it,” and so he was unable to offer any information about the range or the habits of the species he named the Harlequin Humming-Bird.

Five years later, Latham came across another source of information, a drawing by the famous watercolorist Thomas Davies, who had been in the West Indies in 1786. Davies’s rendering of the bird differs from the British Museum specimen, Latham tells us, in its greater length—five inches rather than four and a half—and in the presence of a narrow band of blue green on the back of the head, a character well shown by Latham’s plate in the Supplement to his General Synopsis of Birds.

That image and the accompanying description provided the “type” for Johann Friedrich Gmelin, who gave the species its rather bland Linnaean label in 1788, Trochilus multicolor. Latham in turn adopted that name for his 1790 Index ornithologicus, where his brief description of the bird could be read to imply that he had seen further specimens, “in some of which there is a blue-green patch below the nape.”

George Shaw, in his Naturalist’s Miscellany the following year, was able to narrow the range of the Harlequin, “among the rarest species of its genus,” to South America, hardly a bold conjecture in the case of a large, colorful hummingbird. Shaw’s account was accompanied by an awkwardly executed plate by Frederick Nodder, painted, Shaw claims, from the British Museum specimen; the telltale turquoise panel on the upper back, however, reveals that Nodder based his work on Davies’s—or, more likely, on Latham’s description of Davies’s sketch.

The Harlequin Hummingbird was painted again, by Sydenham Edwards, for Louis Pierre Vieillot’s 1802 continuation of the Oiseaux dorés, a lavish work begun by Vieillot and his collaborator Jean-Baptiste Audebert, who had died in December 1800. Vieillot claims that Edwards had worked directly from the skin in the British Museum; whether that was true or not, a close look suggests that Edwards was quite familiar with Nodder’s plate, too, from which it differs in omitting the nape patch Latham had noticed in the Davies drawing, a mark Vieillot says is indicative of a “variety” of the true Harlequin.

Nearly fifty years after its discovery in a museum drawer, this hummingbird was as mysterious as ever. In 1829, René Primevère Lesson wrote of the oiseau-mouche arlequin that

But Lesson had his doubts:

In 1831, Lesson had his answer. In his Trochilidées, he reported that the colibri arlequin of the British Museum had been examined by a Mr. Stokes,

It is a measure of the uncertainty that still obtained in neotropical ornithology—and, perhaps, of the antagonisms that still lingered between French and British naturalists—that William Jardine, two years after the publication of the Trochilidées, could write that

Lesson’s debunking (which Jardine cites) was far more than a hint. Jardine notes, however, that Latham, who would live into the year 1837, had been aware of the rumor. In a footnote to the 1822 edition of the General History, Latham writes that

Jardine included the bird in his own work

“If.”

In preparing his great Monograph of the Trochilidae, John Gould was “at all times favoured … with both information and the loan of specimens” from the collections of the British Museum. Nowhere could he find a skin attesting to the existence of the Harlequin Hummingbird—Lesson’s Mr. Stokes most likely had felt no obligation to reassemble the composite hoax once it was revealed. In relying on Latham, Gould writes, Gmelin had described a new species based on

Indeed, of the 95 hummingbirds Latham included in the revision of his General History, Gould considered only about two-thirds “real species,” the other 30 or more, among them the Harlequin, all “so indefinitely described” as to be unassignable to any known bird.

It seems very unlikely that we will ever know who the ingenious and whimsical creator of Latham’s specimen was, or what bird was depicted in Thomas Davies’s equally mysterious drawing. What is entirely certain, though, is that this is not the only case in the history of “trochidology” where a bird turned out to be something else entirely than what its original discoverers thought or hoped.

Butterflies are in the Papilionoidea superfamily.

Who hasn’t seen the majestic beauty of a butterfly bouncing through the air or hummingbirds hovering near a feeder? If you haven’t you are surely missing out. Whether you have or haven’t seen them, take the opportunity to learn more about them today on National Butterfly and Hummingbird Day. Spread awareness and observe them in nature or at a zoo.

While I can’t be certain if the holiday existed back in the 1800s, even then people knew butterflies and hummingbirds were special. This enthusiasm resulted in books with beautiful illustrations. One of the more popular ones is John Gould’s A Monograph of the Trochilidæ, or Family of Humming Birds, which you can read more about here.

Did you know there are about 24,000 species of butterflies and representations of butterflies have been found in Egyptian frescoes at Thebes, which are 3,500 years old? Butterflies are fascinating creatures. If you want to learn more about them check out  The butterfly book; a popular guide to a knowledge of the butterflies of North America by William Jacob Holland. While he was still Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, Holland’s book was published in 1898. This accomplished zoologist and paleontologist was a forward thinker that helped popularize butterflies and moths in the early 20th century.

A photograph of Holland from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History Museum.

Featuring 48 plates of color photography, this book presents many of the butterfly species in the United States. Written with a youthful and amateur collector in mind, the book presents these delicate creatures in a positive light. A goal of Holland’s was to change the perception of butterflies. He quotes Henry Walter Bates’ The Naturalist on the River Amazons in the introduction which summarizes his goal, “The study of butterflies, — creatures selected as the types of airiness and frivolity, — instead of being despised, will someday be valued as one of the most important branches of biological science.”

Antarctica is the only continent on which no Lepidoptera have been found.

Many of the reproduced photographs of butterflies are from Holland’s own collection. Exceeding 250,000 specimens, he donated his private collection to the Carnegie Museum where the collection has grown and been used at unprecedented levels since access was granted to it in 1985. Holland’s collection continues to serve science, conservation, and education to this day.

Check out images from the The Butterfly Book here.