Eclectus Roratus Polychloros

Edward Lear

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Known as a landscape painter and a writer of nonsense verse, Lear began his career as an ornithological draftsman. This work records male and female Eclectus parrots, a species native to Australia, New Guinea, and Indonesia. The bird is unique for its distinct plumage-predominantly green in males, red and blue in females. The design was made for one of the lithographs in "Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots," the first book devoted to a single bird species, which the artist published between 1830 and 1832. Preparatory to making the prints, Lear sketched live specimens and bird skins at the London Zoological Society, then transferred selected images to lithographic stones for printing. The final step was to color the prints by hand.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art