Keulemans lithograph of Duyvenbode's Lory, Chalcopsittacus duyvenbodei. Mivart c1896.

by Keulemans, John Gerrard

John Gerrard Keulemans lithograph for "A Monograph of the Lories, or Brush-tongued Parrots, composing the Family Loriidae", which comprised 61 of the more spectacularly coloured Lories and Lorikeets from the Pacific Islands and Australia – with 16 species that had not been recorded and painted previously.

Original hand-coloured lithograph by artist and lithographer John Gerrard Keulemans (1842-1912) for St George Jackson Mivart (1827-1900), published in London in 1896 by R.H. Porter. Keulemans was considered the finest illustrator of animals and birds, and moved from Netherlands to London when Richard Bowdler Sharpe, keeper of birds at what is now the Natural History Museum, commissioned him to illustrate his Monograph of the Alcedinidae, or Family of Kingfishers. Keulemans worked in London from 1870 to 1910, during the pinnacle of finely illustrated books. His beautiful lithographs have always been acknowledged as anatomically correct, and sensitively and aesthetically illustrated - each signed JGK.

St George Jackson Mivart, Ph.D., M.D. F.R.S. (1827-1900) was an English anatomist and biologist who mainly wrote and published works on the anatomical studies of insectivores and carnivores. He was actually more famous for his belief in natural selection – a theory he later rejected quite strenuously. In 1871 Mivart published “On the Genesis of the Species” for which Darwin prepared a point-by-point refutation which appeared in the sixth edition of Origin of Species” - and many opther fierce challenges between himself, Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley.
Mivart was Vice-President of the Zoological Society twice (1869 and 1882), Fellow of the Linnean Society from 1862, Secretary from 1874 to 1880, Vice-President in 1892, and elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1867, for his work “On the Appendicular Skeleton of Primates” (work that was communicated to the Society by T.H. Huxley). Mivart was a member of the Metaphysical Society from 1874, and received the degrees of Doctor of Philosophy from Pope Pius IX in 1876 and Doctor of Medicine from the University of Louvain in 1884.

Page size, 320 x 255mm (12.5 x 10 inches).