John Gould / Elizabeth Gould / H. C. Richter

John Gould (1804–1881) was an English ornithologist and publisher of illustrated natural history books, born in Lyme Regis, Dorset. He trained as a gardener, worked as a taxidermist and in 1827 became the first curator of the Zoological Society of London's museum. Gould is best known for The Birds of Australia, issued in seven volumes between 1840 and 1848 with about six hundred hand-coloured lithographic plates. Elizabeth Gould, his wife from 1829, drew and lithographed the plates for many of his books, including eighty-four for The Birds of Australia, before her death in 1841. The couple sailed to Australia in 1838, arriving in Tasmania that September with the collector John Gilbert, and returned to England in May 1840. In 1837 Gould examined the birds Charles Darwin brought back on the Beagle and identified the Galápagos finches as a group of separate species. His other works include The Birds of Europe, The Mammals of Australia and a monograph on hummingbirds. Gould died in London in 1881.