Mark Catesby, Naturalist, 1720's

This image of a bird and plant by Mark Catesby. He was an early eighteenth-century naturalist who visited Virginia, the Carolinas, Florida, and the West Indies. His second voyage in the 1720s was financed, in part, by Sir Hans Sloane, also a naturalist. Catesby sent back copious quantities of biological materials to his friends and supporters in London. His two-volume Natural History contains 220 large-scale, detailed, plates of plants and animals that were drawn, etched, and hand colored by Catesby.