We have acquired two paintings this year to add to our growing collection of original art related to ornithology. The artist is Sarah Stone (1760-1844), a talented watercolorist employed by the entrepreneur Sir Ashton Lever to record the contents of his extraordinary private museum. This consisted of specimens and ethnographic material being brought back by British expeditions to Australia, the Americas, Africa and the Far East in the 1780s and 1790s–most importantly from Cook’s round-the-world voyages.

The Lever museum was dispersed in 1806, and although the specimens have been lost, almost 1,000 of Stone’s paintings are in private and institutional hands–they are often the only remaining record of specimens which were used by scientists in the 18thC for descriptions of new species  (some now extinct) for the first time.

Source: Sarah Stone: Natural Curiosities from the New Worlds, by Christine Jackson (1998)