Credit: © The Royal Society
Image number: RS.9778
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Great Reed Warbler and its nest
Date
ca. 1784
Object type
Archive reference number
Material
Dimensions
height (painting): 160mm
width (painting): 196mm
width (painting): 196mm
Subject
Content object
Description
Plate 1 from the paper “An account of an English bird of the genus Motacilla, supposed to be hitherto unnoticed by British ornithologists”, by John Lightfoot, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol.75 (1785), pp.8-15.
Study of the bird classified and described by John Lightfoot FRS (1735-1788) clergyman and naturalist in a letter to Sir Joseph Banks, as Motacilla arundinacea [Acrocephalus arundinaceus]. Lightfoot related how the nest and eggs of the bird were discovered by a fisherman on the bank of the River Uxbridge in the Parish of Denham and presented to Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, the Dowager Duchess of Portland (1715-1785) who relayed them to Lightfoot (her Chaplain and Librarian). The bird is shown nesting in a “trifurcated branch of a Syringa bush, or Philadelphus, growing in a garden hedge by the river side.” The nest incorporates thread or twine in its construction. A detail of an egg appears lower right.
Inscribed in pencil upper right “Tab 1” and verso “Tab I Vol.75”. Initialled in ink by the artist, lower left “WP Pxt.” [?].
Study of the bird classified and described by John Lightfoot FRS (1735-1788) clergyman and naturalist in a letter to Sir Joseph Banks, as Motacilla arundinacea [Acrocephalus arundinaceus]. Lightfoot related how the nest and eggs of the bird were discovered by a fisherman on the bank of the River Uxbridge in the Parish of Denham and presented to Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, the Dowager Duchess of Portland (1715-1785) who relayed them to Lightfoot (her Chaplain and Librarian). The bird is shown nesting in a “trifurcated branch of a Syringa bush, or Philadelphus, growing in a garden hedge by the river side.” The nest incorporates thread or twine in its construction. A detail of an egg appears lower right.
Inscribed in pencil upper right “Tab 1” and verso “Tab I Vol.75”. Initialled in ink by the artist, lower left “WP Pxt.” [?].
Associated place