John Gerrard Keulemans

John Gerrard Keulemans (1842–1912) drew the thirty-three hand-coloured plates for W. V. Legge’s A History of the Birds of Ceylon without ever having seen the island. He worked instead from prepared skins and the field notes of others, in London, and belongs to the class of artist whose Ceylon is a studio Ceylon, reconstructed at a distance; the birds are nonetheless rendered with an exactness that made the monograph the standard ornithological work on the island for a generation.

Born Johannes Gerardus Keulemans at Rotterdam on 8 June 1842, he became the foremost bird illustrator of his age. He collected specimens abroad early in his career, on a West African expedition of 1864 and around the island of Príncipe soon after, but he settled in England and spent the greater part of his working life there, supplying the plates for a long series of the best-known nineteenth-century ornithological books. His method was the hand-coloured lithograph, the plates for the Ceylon work printed by the firm of Hanhart.

Legge’s A History of the Birds of Ceylon was issued in London in three parts between 1878 and 1880. Its author, William Vincent Legge (1841–1918), was an officer of the Royal Artillery stationed on the island, and the monograph describes some three hundred and seventy-one species; Keulemans’s thirty-three plates carry its coloured illustration. The book stands with the natural-history plate works of Bennett and Samuel Daniell as one of the enduring illustrated records of the island’s fauna, and the value of Keulemans’s contribution rests not on any first-hand view of Ceylon, which he never had, but on the accuracy with which he set down what the specimen and the naturalist’s note could tell him. First editions are held in institutional collections and appear in the rare-book trade; the work has been digitised in full by the Biodiversity Heritage Library.