Bar Tailed Godwits (Limosa Lapponica). Original Watercolour for John Gould's Birds of Great Britain 1862-73.

Original watercolour heightened with body colour, numbered in pencil to the lower right ‘4.51’, (300 x 450 mm)

A particularly beautiful large watercolour of one of the most attractive winter visitors.

The Bar-tailed Godwit is a long-billed, long-legged wading bird, which visits UK shores for the winter. Most usually seen in its grey-brown winter plumage, birds in spring may show their full rich chestnut breeding plumage. In flight it shows a white patch stretching from the rump up the back, narrowing to a point. It breeds in the Arctic of Scandinavia and Siberia.

A fine example of Richter’s work. He was one of a small group of distinguished artists whom Gould employed to work on his various ornithological works. It is generally considered that he did his best work for The Birds of Great Britain, op. cit., for which he made a total of about 280 watercolours. He was the first artist to draw and lithograph family groups of British birds with nestlings and fledglings in their appropriate environments.
In the text which accompanies the published image, Gould relates that the Bar-tailed Godwit was found during autumn ‘wherever a tidal estuary or a low flat beach occurs’. In the spring large flocks from the south added to the wintering birds particularly on the eastern coasts. He adds: ‘They are now in the finest dress, having exchanged the grey plumage of winter for the rich chestnut livery of the approaching nuptial season…’. The rusty-red male is depicted here in summer plumage, the larger female in winter plumage.
The Limosa Lapponica was previously known as Limosa rufa.

Provenance: Frederick Ducane Godman and by descent to Mr. and Mrs. V.A. G. Tregear, Christie’s London, 4 October 1994, lot 138. Painted for John Gould’s Birds of Great Britain, 1862-1873, volume 4 plate 51.