White-Bodied Sunbird, Plate 17 from Birds of Western Africa
Classification
Department
Smithsonian Collection
Museum
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Credit
Gift of Hamill and Barker
Accession Number
1961-105-175
About this artwork
Research in Progress
Art Historical Context
William Home Lizars’s *White-Bodied Sunbird, Plate 17 from Birds of Western Africa* (1837) captures the delicate beauty of an African sunbird with the precision expected of nineteenth-century natural-history illustration. A Scottish engraver and painter active during the height of scientific exploration, Lizars specialized in translating living specimens into finely detailed prints that brought distant wildlife to European audiences. This plate belongs to a larger series documenting the birds of Western Africa, reflecting the era’s growing fascination with exotic species and the expanding reac...