François Levaillant travelled through southern Africa in the 1780s and came home with birds nobody in Europe had seen. The plates that followed were printed in colour and finished by hand, plate by plate — which is why no two surviving copies are quite identical.
His birds are posed alive rather than laid out as specimens: perched, turning, about to move. That makes them warmer on a wall than the stiffer ornithological plates of the same era, and the colour — deep greens, hot reds, iridescent blues — carries across a room.
One bird framed alone above a desk works. Three in a row above a sideboard works better.
See our natural history prints, Audubon's Birds of America and our vintage animal prints.
