Elizabeth Gwillim (bird artist)

Information on their children is inconclusive: London archives document the burial of an infant on 13 January 1786, also named Elizabeth, who was born 31 March 1785 and baptized 20 June 1785 at St.

[7] Elizabeth Gwillim, her husband, her unmarried sister Mary Symonds, Sir Henry’s assistant Richard Clarke, another clerk, and two Indian servants embarked at Plymouth on the Hindostan in 31 March 1801, arriving in Madras (now called Chennai) almost five months later, on 26 July.

The letters cover a wide variety of topics such as the climate, the landscape, the food, local social and religious customs, and much more.

She and her sister Mary very likely received basic drawing instructions from their artistic father, and from their letters we know that they later trained under George Samuel, whom they often mention.

Authors such as George Edwards (A Natural History of Uncommon Birds, 1743–51), Mark Catesby (Natural History of Caroline, Florida and the Bahama Islands, 1729–47), and Thomas Pennant (Indian Zoology, 1790) all contributed to the growing field of ornithological illustrations, and in her own series Gwillim painted birds that were also featured in each of these aforementioned earlier volumes.

George Shaw's catalogue of the Leverian collection,[13] featuring bird paintings by Sarah Stone, is another possible source of inspiration.

Knowledge of Gwillim’s artistic process comes from letters, primarily a description from Mary: "Poor Betsy is never out of trouble for if you gets [sic] dead subjects to draw from they become offensive before she can finish the work to her mind, & when the birds are brought in alive they stare, or kick, or peck, or do some vile trick or other that frightens her out of her wits, sometimes she thinks the birds look sick, that is whenever they stand quiet & then in a great fit of tenderness she lets them fly before they are finished, least thier [sic] sufferings should be revenged upon her or their ghosts should come flying round her & flapping thier [sic] great wings, scare her to death.

Mary notes in a different letter that "her present employments keep her quite happy I almost wish you could see her in her glory; that is, with about twenty black men round her, a table full of books, the floor strewed with baskets of seeded branches of trees, and she herself standing in the midst with her cap snatched [?]

The most consistent trait in Gwillim's birds is her depiction and placement of feathers in such a way that shows an unprecedented understanding of avian anatomy.

An aspect of ornithology was pterylography, the study of the patterns of distribution of the pterylae and apterylae particularly in young birds as these were morphological indicators of evolutionary relatedness.

Gwillim also took a keen interest in botany, detailed often in her letters, and was an active member of the global network of naturalists who sent seeds, plants, and illustrations to their friends and peers.

She was cited in Curtis's Botanical Magazine, the preeminent publication on the topic at the time and praised by the editor John Sims (taxonomist) for her "accurate and graceful drawings.

She relied on their expertise for sourcing her subjects, for managing their care (see the "venerable old Moor man" mentioned above), and for information on their habitats and behaviour, as her own ability to observe them in the wild would have been limited.

[25] Her husband was recalled from the Court the following year under contentious circumstances and returned with Mary to England via the Cape of Good Hope.

[26] On Gwillim’s place in the history of bird illustrations, Wood wrote: "It has been the proud belief of Americans, myself included, that it was our Audubon who first produced full length portraits of the largest birds, and certainly the pictures of the male and female Wild Turkey, of Washington's Eagle etc., and their exact reproduction in the elephant folio bear out that claim.

However, so far as originals are concerned, we must now concede the palm to Lady Gwillim, who so far as I know, is the first artist-ornithologist to paint full-sized and exact pictures of any considerable number of birds whose length exceeds, say, 35 inches.

[28] Other group exhibits featuring Gwillim’s work include the Royal Ontario Museum’s Animals in Art in 1975 and the Glenbow-Alberta Institute’s Birds of Prey in 1977.

Curated by Allan Walkinshaw with contributions from Canadian ornithologist and artist Terence Michael Shortt, this exhibition and its catalogue situated Gwillim among other early British naturalists as well as within the popularity of watercolors as a serious medium.