Female Scaup and a Second Female Diving Duck after Lilian Medland, c. 1909

This is an original antique photogravure, printed in black and gray without added color, with two figures on an upright sheet. The upper bird stands on bare ground facing left: a female Scaup, with a dark brown head, a broad white band around the base of the bill, a pale eye, a brown breast and white underparts. The lower bird swims to the right on rippled water. It is a female diving duck with a large rounded dark head, a pale eye, a short dark bill crossed by a pale band near the tip, a mottled gray brown breast, pale flanks and a white panel on the folded wing.

No name of either bird is printed on the plate. Each figure has its own scale note, "1/3 scale", and the plate number "PLATE CLXXXV." is at lower right, the fraction giving the size of the drawing against the living bird. No signature is visible. The broad white band at the base of the bill marks the upper figure as a female Scaup; the lower figure carries the plumage of a female diving duck, without a mark that settles its species with certainty.

Charles Stonham's The Birds of the British Islands was published in London by E. Grant Richards in five volumes between 1906 and 1911, and this plate belongs to the third volume, which carries the account through the cormorants, herons, geese, swans and ducks. All of the plates are after drawings by Lilian M. Medland, who later married the ornithologist Tom Iredale and moved to Australia. Her drawings were reproduced in photogravure, a photomechanical intaglio process that keeps the soft gradations of tone of the original drawing, and the printed surface sits within a plate mark.

Stacked one above the other, the two figures fill a tall frame well and make a natural companion to the drake plates of the same volume.

This is an original antique print, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.