The Laughing Gull – Mark Catesby

A black-headed gull with a red bill, standing on a rock. Mark Catesby draws the laughing gull in profile, its long grey wings crossed over its tail, its white breast and its black hood setting off the red of its bill and the bright eye. The bird stands on a dark rock at the water’s edge, against a plain cream ground, in a composition of great simplicity.

The laughing gull owes its name to its call, a series of loud notes that sound like laughter, familiar on the beaches of the American Atlantic coast. In summer, adults wear the black hood shown here; in winter, it fades to grey. Catesby drew it from life on the coasts he explored.

Mark Catesby, painter of American birds

Mark Catesby (1683-1749), an English naturalist, devoted the first volume of his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands almost entirely to the birds of North America, drawn from life and then etched and coloured by his own hand, a hundred years before Audubon’s Birds of America.

• Artist: Mark Catesby (1683-1749)
• Date: published 1731-1743
• Technique: etching and engraving, hand-coloured
• Source: The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, vol. I, plate 89
• Format: horizontal
• Theme: laughing gull, seabird, coast, ornithology

A light, graphic print for a living room, a bathroom or a seaside house. It goes well with The Wood Pelican and The Flamingo; find more plates in our vintage animal posters. Printed on thick matte archival paper, in 13 sizes from A4 to A0. Free shipping, no minimum order. Shipped rolled in a sturdy tube.