Elizabeth Gould (née Coxen) 1804-1841
Elizabeth Gould (née Coxen) 1804-1841
Procellaria glacioloïdes, Smith. Silvery-grey petrel 1840
Pencil and watercolour on wove paper (watermarked ‘J.Whatman / 1837’)
35.5 x 51 cm
Signed, located and dated bottom left: ’South Pacific Ocean / May 1840. J & E Gould’
Procellaria glacioloïdes, Smith. Silvery-grey petrel 1840
Pencil and watercolour on wove paper (watermarked ‘J.Whatman / 1837’)
35.5 x 51 cm
Signed, located and dated bottom left: ’South Pacific Ocean / May 1840. J & E Gould’
Provenance:
The Ornithological Works of John Gould, F.R.S. 1832-1888: original drawings for same by Mr & Mrs Gould, H.C. Richter, W. Hart etc., Henry Sotheran Ltd., London, 1934, no. 792
James Fairfax, AC
Leonard Joel, The Decorative Arts Collection of James Fairfax AC, Sydney, 1 September 2017, lot 464
Bibliography:
John Gould, The Birds of Australia (7 vols), London: the author, 1848, Plate 563, vol. VII, p. 48 (illus. - lithograph by H.C. Richter).
J.H. Stonehouse (ed.), The Ornithological Works of John Gould, F.R.S. 1832-1888: original drawings for same by Mr & Mrs Gould, H.C. Richter, W. Hart etc. (Picadilly Notes No. 9), London: Henry Sotheran Ltd, 1933, pp. 74, 81 (illus.), 83, 93
Ernest Scott, ‘“Gould, the Bird Man”: Great Naturalist’s Drawings’, The Argus (Melbourne) 30 June, 1934, p. 9 (illus. p. 5)
Gordon Sauer, John Gould the Bird Man: A Chronology and Bibliography, London: H. Sotheran, 1982, pp. 44, 119
In 2016 Australian novelist Melissa Ashley published a novel entitled The Birdman’s Wife, a semi-fictionalised account of the life of Elizabeth Gould. Interviewed by Kate Evans on ABC Radio National’s Books and Arts program, Ashley declared with righteous, third-wave/Me Too indignation: ‘Almost two hundred years since she made her contribution … over and again she’s presented as the sidekick, as the acolyte, the assistant, as the domesticated, pleasant, controlled Victorian mother... John Gould's name is everywhere, and on the frontispiece, and on each plate there is a little signature: J & E Gould. Elizabeth is an E. That's all she is.’
Ashley’s feminist frustration is understandable, and broadly shared. Across the world art museums are currently engaged in progressive, inclusive programs designed to rediscover and celebrate the work of women artists, from the #5WomenArtists campaign by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. to the National Gallery of Australia’s ‘Know My Name.’
Elizabeth Gould appears in an unattributed posthumous portrait as ‘domesticated, pleasant, controlled,’ holding that most delicate and beautiful of parrots, the cockatiel. However, both her energy and her artistic achievement have always been recognised, if not at the same popular level as her scientific-entrepreneurial husband, then certainly by experts in the field of ornithology. At the start of her publishing career, the Irish zoologist and co-author of A Century of Himalayan Birds, Nicholas Aylward Vigors, named the gorgeous Mrs Gould’s sunbird (Aethopyga gouldiae) in her honour, and following her untimely death John Gould himself named the equally beautiful and colourful Gouldian finch (Erythrura gouldiae) in her memory.
Elizabeth Coxen was born in 1804, the same year as the man she would later marry. Daughter of a Kentish military family, trained in the then womanly-fashionable medium of watercolour, and working in the womanly profession of governess, she met her taxidermist husband through her taxidermist brother Charles; Elizabeth and John married in 1824. With John’s encouragement, Elizabeth became an adept natural history artist, initially with illustrations accompanying her husband’s mounted specimens. With further tutoring from Gould’s collaborator Edward Lear, and having also learned the technique of lithography, she soon became a central pillar of the family ornithological publishing enterprise. In the 10 years between 1831 and her death, she produced more than 650 plates for publication, including 84 for the legendary The Birds of Australia. She also bore eight children, and her death in 1841 was from that common 19th century post-partum killer, ‘childbed fever’ or puerperal sepsis. Her premature death meant that in the published volume of Birds of Australia, the lithograph after the present work was drawn by another of Gould’s illustrators, Henry Richter.
Elizabeth’s watercolours - indeed all of the original works of art reproduced in John Gould’s publications - are relatively rare, an unavoidable result of loss or damage from their being part of a commercial, reproductive process. Apart from those in public collections - a volume of watercolours (43 by John, 32 by Elizabeth and three credited to both) from the collection of the 13th Earl of Derby which was recently (2019) given to the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, three individual works in the State Library of Victoria and one in the W.L. Crowther Library, Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office - very few of the models for The Birds of Australia’s 681 lithographs have survived.
This charming exception, an original watercolour by Elizabeth Gould, depicts male and female Southern fulmars (Fulmarus glacialoïdes), tube-nosed pelagic seabirds of the family Procellariidae, the ‘true petrels.’ The bird is otherwise known as the silver-grey fulmar or the Antarctic fulmar. Although its Arctic cousin, the Northern fulmar, had been documented in the ornithological literature from the late 18th century, the Southern Hemisphere species was first described by the Scottish army surgeon, explorer, ethnologist and naturalist Andrew Smith in 1840; Smith gave it the name Procellaria glacioloïdes, or the Silvery-grey petrel.
Much of John Gould’s reputation and commercial success devolved on his original research and assiduous collecting; of the 600 illustrations in the Birds of Australia, more than half the species were ‘non-descript’ prior to publication. The Silvery-grey petrel might have been another of those first publications, but Gould graciously acknowledges that ‘Dr Smith … was the first to discriminate the characters which distinguish this species…’ The Goulds had travelled to Australia in 1838, returning to England in 1840, and in the text accompanying the plate, Gould notes: ‘during my voyages to and from Australia I saw numerous examples of this bird, both in the Atlantic and the Pacific. I first met with it off the Cape of Good Hope, and it was frequently seen from thence across the South Indian Ocean to New South Wales.’ This watercolour is from rather later in the family’s antipodean travels; it is inscribed ‘May 1840’, in which month John, Elizabeth, their eldest son Henry and baby Franklin were on their way home on board the barque Kinnear. In the middle of the 19th century, the crossing between Australia and South America took a full month; all we can say for certain is that this picture was drawn somewhere in the southern Pacific Ocean, somewhere in the 7,000-odd kilometres between New Zealand Aotearoa and Tierra de Fuego. According to the letterpress, one of these specimens was caught by Gould using a hook and line; he notes that ‘with the exception of the Cape Petrel (Daption Capensis), no species was more readily taken with a baited hook.’
Gould himself was highly pleased with and proud of his wife’s work. In the concluding paragraph of his ‘Preface’ to The Birds of Europe (1837) he writes: ‘Perhaps I may be allowed to add, that not only the greatest number of the Plates of this work, but all those of my “Century of Birds”, of the “Monograph of the Trogons”, and at least three fourths of the “Monograph of the Toucans,” have been drawn and lithographed by Mrs Gould …’ In the ‘Preface’ to The Birds of Australia, he describes both the personal grief he felt and the professional quandary he found himself in when his beloved collaborator died: ‘At the conclusion of my “Birds of Europe,” I had the pleasing duty of stating that nearly the whole of the Plates had been lithographed by my amiable wife. Would that I had the happiness of recording a similar statement with regard to the previous work; but such, alas! is not the case, it having pleased the All-wise Disposer of Events to remove her from this sublunary world within one short year after our return from Australia, during her sojourn in which country an immense mass of drawings, both ornithological and botanical, were made by her inimitable hand and pencil…’
Indeed, when Gould himself died in 1881, and an obituarist in The Times described him as a ‘true Priest of Nature’, the journalist Blanchard Jerrold, a family friend, was prompted to respond with a letter to the editor, declaring that ‘the Priest of Nature was assisted by a devoted Priestess. The loving, skilful hands of Mrs Gould were at work, painting the birds that she and her husband so passionately studied together, through trials and perils innumerable, for many a long year … Mr Gould never failed to tell his friends how deep was his debt of gratitude to the artistic aptitude and courageous devotion of his wife and fellow-traveller… She it was who gave form and colour to his 600 varieties of birds. It would grieve him could he know that this debt of his had been overlooked.’
David Hansen
Canberra
May 2020
12 Gould (1848), ‘Preface’, p. x
13 Blanchard Jerrold, ‘Mr. Gould’ (Letter to the Editor), The Times (London), 11 February 1881
The Ornithological Works of John Gould, F.R.S. 1832-1888: original drawings for same by Mr & Mrs Gould, H.C. Richter, W. Hart etc., Henry Sotheran Ltd., London, 1934, no. 792
James Fairfax, AC
Leonard Joel, The Decorative Arts Collection of James Fairfax AC, Sydney, 1 September 2017, lot 464
Bibliography:
John Gould, The Birds of Australia (7 vols), London: the author, 1848, Plate 563, vol. VII, p. 48 (illus. - lithograph by H.C. Richter).
J.H. Stonehouse (ed.), The Ornithological Works of John Gould, F.R.S. 1832-1888: original drawings for same by Mr & Mrs Gould, H.C. Richter, W. Hart etc. (Picadilly Notes No. 9), London: Henry Sotheran Ltd, 1933, pp. 74, 81 (illus.), 83, 93
Ernest Scott, ‘“Gould, the Bird Man”: Great Naturalist’s Drawings’, The Argus (Melbourne) 30 June, 1934, p. 9 (illus. p. 5)
Gordon Sauer, John Gould the Bird Man: A Chronology and Bibliography, London: H. Sotheran, 1982, pp. 44, 119
In 2016 Australian novelist Melissa Ashley published a novel entitled The Birdman’s Wife, a semi-fictionalised account of the life of Elizabeth Gould. Interviewed by Kate Evans on ABC Radio National’s Books and Arts program, Ashley declared with righteous, third-wave/Me Too indignation: ‘Almost two hundred years since she made her contribution … over and again she’s presented as the sidekick, as the acolyte, the assistant, as the domesticated, pleasant, controlled Victorian mother... John Gould's name is everywhere, and on the frontispiece, and on each plate there is a little signature: J & E Gould. Elizabeth is an E. That's all she is.’
Ashley’s feminist frustration is understandable, and broadly shared. Across the world art museums are currently engaged in progressive, inclusive programs designed to rediscover and celebrate the work of women artists, from the #5WomenArtists campaign by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. to the National Gallery of Australia’s ‘Know My Name.’
Elizabeth Gould appears in an unattributed posthumous portrait as ‘domesticated, pleasant, controlled,’ holding that most delicate and beautiful of parrots, the cockatiel. However, both her energy and her artistic achievement have always been recognised, if not at the same popular level as her scientific-entrepreneurial husband, then certainly by experts in the field of ornithology. At the start of her publishing career, the Irish zoologist and co-author of A Century of Himalayan Birds, Nicholas Aylward Vigors, named the gorgeous Mrs Gould’s sunbird (Aethopyga gouldiae) in her honour, and following her untimely death John Gould himself named the equally beautiful and colourful Gouldian finch (Erythrura gouldiae) in her memory.
Elizabeth Coxen was born in 1804, the same year as the man she would later marry. Daughter of a Kentish military family, trained in the then womanly-fashionable medium of watercolour, and working in the womanly profession of governess, she met her taxidermist husband through her taxidermist brother Charles; Elizabeth and John married in 1824. With John’s encouragement, Elizabeth became an adept natural history artist, initially with illustrations accompanying her husband’s mounted specimens. With further tutoring from Gould’s collaborator Edward Lear, and having also learned the technique of lithography, she soon became a central pillar of the family ornithological publishing enterprise. In the 10 years between 1831 and her death, she produced more than 650 plates for publication, including 84 for the legendary The Birds of Australia. She also bore eight children, and her death in 1841 was from that common 19th century post-partum killer, ‘childbed fever’ or puerperal sepsis. Her premature death meant that in the published volume of Birds of Australia, the lithograph after the present work was drawn by another of Gould’s illustrators, Henry Richter.
Elizabeth’s watercolours - indeed all of the original works of art reproduced in John Gould’s publications - are relatively rare, an unavoidable result of loss or damage from their being part of a commercial, reproductive process. Apart from those in public collections - a volume of watercolours (43 by John, 32 by Elizabeth and three credited to both) from the collection of the 13th Earl of Derby which was recently (2019) given to the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, three individual works in the State Library of Victoria and one in the W.L. Crowther Library, Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office - very few of the models for The Birds of Australia’s 681 lithographs have survived.
This charming exception, an original watercolour by Elizabeth Gould, depicts male and female Southern fulmars (Fulmarus glacialoïdes), tube-nosed pelagic seabirds of the family Procellariidae, the ‘true petrels.’ The bird is otherwise known as the silver-grey fulmar or the Antarctic fulmar. Although its Arctic cousin, the Northern fulmar, had been documented in the ornithological literature from the late 18th century, the Southern Hemisphere species was first described by the Scottish army surgeon, explorer, ethnologist and naturalist Andrew Smith in 1840; Smith gave it the name Procellaria glacioloïdes, or the Silvery-grey petrel.
Much of John Gould’s reputation and commercial success devolved on his original research and assiduous collecting; of the 600 illustrations in the Birds of Australia, more than half the species were ‘non-descript’ prior to publication. The Silvery-grey petrel might have been another of those first publications, but Gould graciously acknowledges that ‘Dr Smith … was the first to discriminate the characters which distinguish this species…’ The Goulds had travelled to Australia in 1838, returning to England in 1840, and in the text accompanying the plate, Gould notes: ‘during my voyages to and from Australia I saw numerous examples of this bird, both in the Atlantic and the Pacific. I first met with it off the Cape of Good Hope, and it was frequently seen from thence across the South Indian Ocean to New South Wales.’ This watercolour is from rather later in the family’s antipodean travels; it is inscribed ‘May 1840’, in which month John, Elizabeth, their eldest son Henry and baby Franklin were on their way home on board the barque Kinnear. In the middle of the 19th century, the crossing between Australia and South America took a full month; all we can say for certain is that this picture was drawn somewhere in the southern Pacific Ocean, somewhere in the 7,000-odd kilometres between New Zealand Aotearoa and Tierra de Fuego. According to the letterpress, one of these specimens was caught by Gould using a hook and line; he notes that ‘with the exception of the Cape Petrel (Daption Capensis), no species was more readily taken with a baited hook.’
Gould himself was highly pleased with and proud of his wife’s work. In the concluding paragraph of his ‘Preface’ to The Birds of Europe (1837) he writes: ‘Perhaps I may be allowed to add, that not only the greatest number of the Plates of this work, but all those of my “Century of Birds”, of the “Monograph of the Trogons”, and at least three fourths of the “Monograph of the Toucans,” have been drawn and lithographed by Mrs Gould …’ In the ‘Preface’ to The Birds of Australia, he describes both the personal grief he felt and the professional quandary he found himself in when his beloved collaborator died: ‘At the conclusion of my “Birds of Europe,” I had the pleasing duty of stating that nearly the whole of the Plates had been lithographed by my amiable wife. Would that I had the happiness of recording a similar statement with regard to the previous work; but such, alas! is not the case, it having pleased the All-wise Disposer of Events to remove her from this sublunary world within one short year after our return from Australia, during her sojourn in which country an immense mass of drawings, both ornithological and botanical, were made by her inimitable hand and pencil…’
Indeed, when Gould himself died in 1881, and an obituarist in The Times described him as a ‘true Priest of Nature’, the journalist Blanchard Jerrold, a family friend, was prompted to respond with a letter to the editor, declaring that ‘the Priest of Nature was assisted by a devoted Priestess. The loving, skilful hands of Mrs Gould were at work, painting the birds that she and her husband so passionately studied together, through trials and perils innumerable, for many a long year … Mr Gould never failed to tell his friends how deep was his debt of gratitude to the artistic aptitude and courageous devotion of his wife and fellow-traveller… She it was who gave form and colour to his 600 varieties of birds. It would grieve him could he know that this debt of his had been overlooked.’
David Hansen
Canberra
May 2020
12 Gould (1848), ‘Preface’, p. x
13 Blanchard Jerrold, ‘Mr. Gould’ (Letter to the Editor), The Times (London), 11 February 1881
