John Cotton (ornithologist)

[1] In 1843 Cotton migrated with his family (comprising his wife Susanna and nine children) to the Port Phillip District of New South Wales in Australia, now better known as the state of Victoria.

However, circumstances were against him; John Gould's monumental illustrated handbook The Birds of Australia, issued in seven volumes from 1840 to 1848, was dominating the potential market for Cotton's intended publication, and there was little interest in, or appreciation for, his paintings.

In it McEvey concludes his account of Cotton's life with: "But apart from his historical position, apart from his records of value, he was to have a continuing if indirect link with Australian ornithology through the marriages of his children.

Gentle, sensitive, artistic, and educated in the age of the Grand Tour, John Cotton was a man of the time not an innovator; in natural history a compiler and painter rather than a chronicler.

In ornithology his capacity and ambition to be more than a naturalist in Colonial solitude were hampered by distance, impoverished by lack of encouragement, and ended with his early death.