(Discounted) Australian Black Kite. Milvus affinus (Allied Kite), c1920.

by Henrik Gronvold

Australian raptor antique print. Young Fork-tailed Kite - with lighter colour and shorter tail-division.

Original hand-coloured lithograph by Henrik Gronvold (1858-1940) for The Birds of Australia by Gregory Macalister Mathews (1876-1949). Published in London between 1910 and 1927, this was one of the last series of beautiful hand-coloured lithographs - a skilled, labour-intensive process.

Gregory Mathews was born in northern New South Wales and educated at Singleton Grammar and King's School, Parramatta. He was not a scientist but devoted himself to studying Australasian birds and was associated with scientific organizations around the world. In England from 1902, Richard Bowdler Sharpe of the British Museum, who had worked with 'The Bird Man' John Gould, encouraged Mathews to produce a less expensive work on Australian birds. Self-funded, Mathews researched and compiled 600 bird lithographs and descriptive texts.

He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and was made a Commander of the British Empire by the King in 1939, in recognition of his contributions to science. Mathews presented his enormous ornithological library to Australian in 1939, and it is now housed in the National Library in Canberra.

Page size is 345mm x 255mm (13.1/2 x 10 inches). This beautiful lithograph has been discounted because of paper creasing at top and bottom left corners.