Mark Catesby (1683-1749) was an English naturalist and author of The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands. Originating the genre of bird art, he broke with traditional methods of illustration giving movement and realism to his depictions by placing his birds against botanical backgrounds. Catesby’s was the best illustrative treatment of the flora and fauna of North America until the time of John James Audubon and stayed the reference work for ornithologists, naturalists, and scientists for a hundred years. Audubon’s Birds of America would receive greater fame as his skill as an artist was more developed, but Catesby is recognized as the founder of American ornithology and the “Colonial Audubon.”

A self-taught artist and a scientist, Catesby began collecting plants and specimens in 1712, when he sailed to Williamsburg, Virginia to visit his sister. For the next seven years he saw and recorded his observations of the topography, rivers, plants, trees, birds, and Indigenous peoples of the American colonies he visited. He assembled an enormous collection of plants and animals from the Southeast and returned to England where “celebrated botanist” William Sherard and the Royal Society, then chaired by Sir Isaac Newton, sponsored Catesby’s return to the American Colonies in 1722. Four years later Catesby set about the task of assembling the first of his two-volume set published in 1731, a century before Audubon’s hand-colored illustrations were published in a series between 1827 and 1838.

Catesby’s first volume (shown here) has 220 drawings presented as a Royal Folio measuring twenty-one inches vertically. He created 160 copies of his work. Each copy’s illustrations were hand-colored, and no two copies are exactly alike. Eighty copies of Natural History still exist. Catesby personally worked with his watercolor to engrave his drawings into copper plates, often combining two different sketches into one. The force of the copperplate printing process pressed the paper deep and resulted in a three-dimensional, tactile image. Catesby produced well-defined images and vibrant colors because the inks used were opaque. His labor to create Natural History lasted two decades. Catesby’s original paintings for Natural History are now in the Royal Collection in Windsor Castle.

In the display case, the volume is open to the entry for "Passerculus", or "the little sparrow".