Black skimmer
Date
1731
Creator
Mark Catesby (1683 - 1749, British) , Naturalist
Object type
Library reference
18894
Material
Technique
Dimensions
height (print): 265mm
width (print): 355mm
width (print): 355mm
Subject
Content object
Description
Ornithological study of a black skimmer, Rynchops niger, referred to here as larus major rostro, shown in right profile. A bird from the Rynchopidae family, native to the Americas.
Signed below and inscribed above: ’90 Larus major rostro inaequali.
Cutwater.’
Written in the associated description: ‘The Bill, which is the characteristick note of this Bird, is a wonderful work of Nature. The basis of the upper Mandible is thick and compressed sideways gradually to the end, and terminates in a point, and is three inches long. The under Mandible is more compressed than the upper, and very thin […] Half the Bill, next the Head, is red, and the rest is black’.
Plate 90 from volume I of Mark Catesby’s The natural history of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (London, 1731).
Mark Catesby (1683-1749), British naturalist was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1733. Travelling under the auspices of the Royal Society, Catesby recorded the earliest scientific descriptions of the flora and fauna of the ‘New World’. He was the first naturalist to use folio-sized colour plates in a natural history book, and etched the copper plates himself before hand-colouring each individual print with watercolours.
Signed below and inscribed above: ’90 Larus major rostro inaequali.
Cutwater.’
Written in the associated description: ‘The Bill, which is the characteristick note of this Bird, is a wonderful work of Nature. The basis of the upper Mandible is thick and compressed sideways gradually to the end, and terminates in a point, and is three inches long. The under Mandible is more compressed than the upper, and very thin […] Half the Bill, next the Head, is red, and the rest is black’.
Plate 90 from volume I of Mark Catesby’s The natural history of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (London, 1731).
Mark Catesby (1683-1749), British naturalist was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1733. Travelling under the auspices of the Royal Society, Catesby recorded the earliest scientific descriptions of the flora and fauna of the ‘New World’. He was the first naturalist to use folio-sized colour plates in a natural history book, and etched the copper plates himself before hand-colouring each individual print with watercolours.
Object history
The Natural History was originally published in 10 parts, intended to be bound in 2 volumes. It was the earliest western scientific description of the flora and fauna of North America, and its copper plates were etched and hand-coloured by Catesby himself.
Catesby’s trips to North America were funded by a group of sponsors, many of whom were colonial governors, charged with managing the British Empire’s territories, and their support of Catesby’s research can be read as an exercise in colonial control. As The Natural History’s parts were issued it also became important as a reference text to naturalists attempting to order the natural world according to the ambitious taxonomic systems that characterized the mid-18th century.
Catesby’s trips to North America were funded by a group of sponsors, many of whom were colonial governors, charged with managing the British Empire’s territories, and their support of Catesby’s research can be read as an exercise in colonial control. As The Natural History’s parts were issued it also became important as a reference text to naturalists attempting to order the natural world according to the ambitious taxonomic systems that characterized the mid-18th century.
Associated place