Spectacular Rare Old Original Bird Print of The Spectacled Cormorant, 1868

1868 · Birds, Plants & Natural History

Spectacular Rare Old Original Bird Print of The Spectacled Cormorant, 1868

Name: Spectacular Rare Old Original Bird Print of The Spectacled Cormorant, 1868
Brand: John James Audubon
SKU: BGI-01372
Price: 2070 USD
Availability: InStock

$2,070

€1,850 · dollar price at today's exchange rate

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Shipping to the United States: $51 standard, $73 express, insured and tracked.

Date: 1868
Maker: John James Audubon
Kind: Birds, Plants & Natural History
Size: 58 × 46 cm (22.8 × 18.1 in)
Period: The Gilded Age
Reference: BGI-01372

What the condition grades mean

Excellent: Bright and clean, with no faults worth mentioning.
Very good: Only light signs of age, such as faint toning.
Good: Normal signs of age for a sheet of this period: toning, some foxing, small marks or neat old repairs.
Fair: Clear faults such as staining, tears or repairs, priced to match.

Every fault we see is written in the condition note, and the whole sheet is shown uncropped in the photos.

Guaranteed original. This is an original of the period stated, not a later reproduction or print-on-demand copy. If it is ever shown to be otherwise, we refund you in full.

Shipping to the United States. Sent from our gallery in Langweer, the Netherlands, flat between boards or rolled in a tube, and fully insured. Delivery and import charges.

About this piece

Spectacled cormorant (Graculus perspicillatus), an original large folio lithograph with hand coloring from Daniel Giraud Elliot's The New and Heretofore Unfigured Species of the Birds of North America, published in New York for the author between 1866 and 1869. The plate is lettered "Graculus perspicillatus" and credits the drawing to J. Wolf of London, with the imprint "Bowen & Co. Lith. Phila."

A single large bird is shown at life size, perched on a grassy ledge in profile, its dark green head crowned with a wispy crest and its eye ringed in yellow, with a hooked bill and a patch of yellow skin at the base. The wing is a glossy plum-purple, and the flank carries a white patch. Behind the bird a sea in turquoise stretches to the horizon, and in the middle distance other cormorants sit on a rocky islet with a few gulls.

The spectacled cormorant was a bird of the northern Pacific, known from Bering Island and nearby coasts. It became extinct in the nineteenth century. Elliot's work focused on birds of the American West and Pacific coast that earlier ornithologists had not figured.

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