John Gould (1804-1881) English, (2) Framed Bird Prints. Lithographs depicts the Icelandic falcon and the Norwegian falcon, with descriptors at the bottom of each image and texts attached to the backs about them taken from Gould's publication. 

Overall Size: 30 1/2 x 24 in. 

Sight Size: 20 x 14 in. 

John Gould was born on September 14th, 1804 in Lyme Regis, England. The son of a gardener, he had little education, but when his father worked on Dowager Lady Poulett’s glass house he was rewarded with a position on an estate near Guildford, Surrey and became foreman for the Royal Gardens of Windsor. Gould apprenticed from the age of 14 to 20 under J. T. Aiton to be a gardener before working under his father. In 1824 he went to the gardener at Ripley Castle in Yorkshire, where he became an expert in the art of taxidermy, particularly of birds. In 1826 he set up a taxidermist business in London, which led to him becoming the first curator and preserver at the museum of the Zoological Society of London the following year. He began associating with the country’s leading naturalists, and he married the painter Elizabeth Coxen in 1829, who encouraged him to explore artistic pursuits of his own. Gould’s first published work, A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains, had text by Nicholas Aylward Vigors and illustrations drawn and lithographed by his wife from rough sketches he had made. Over the next seven years he made four more works, including Birds of Europe, by which time he was writing his own texts and was acknowledged as the foremost ornithologist in the empire. In 1838 he and his wife moved to Australia to work on the Birds of Australia, but she died shortly after their return to England in 1841, with all his subsequent books using a number of different artists, including Henry Constantine Richter, William Matthew Hart, and Joseph Wolf. His work identifying birds for Charles Darwin on his voyages was pivotal in the formation of the Theory of Evolution. Considered the greatest figure in the history of bird illustrations after Audubon, a number of animals have been named after him, including reptiles, mice, fish, and (of course) birds. The Gould League, founded in Australia in 1909 as one of the earliest ecological education and preservation organizations in the world, is named after him, and his death on February 3rd, 1881 was mourned by the intellectual community and the public alike, as his prints were some of the most popular throughout the United Kingdom at the time.