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According to Anthony Griffiths of the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, Barlow and Hollar issued their first set of bird prints in 1654, and in 1658 was a reissue with: new plates, revised/reversed plates, and reprinted plates issued by the publisher William Faithorne. The evidence is incomplete, but these prints are from one of those two issues. These prints were originally issued for an exceedingly scarce book containing the earliest British ornithological prints.
"Some of the earliest recognizable birds appeared in prints etched by professional craftsmen employed by Francis Barlow. He issued a series of prints (there was no text) of his paintings of birds, etched by Wenceslaus Hollar and other foreign etchers working in England in the mid-seventeenth century. Barlow drew delightful pictures of birds, all of them lively creatures shown pecking, flying, squabbling, scratching, dabbling, and preening . . .. His excellent prints set a high standard of bird portraiture, as his birds were also accurately rendered, but unfortunately they were largely ignored by later artists." (Christine Jackson. Bird Etchings (1985), p. 29.)
No artists captured birds in motion so well until John James Audubon and his contemporaries in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.
Each of these prints is priced at $600
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