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A friend who owns an antique shop took me for a drive deep into the country to meet a friend who has been an avid collector. Now in his 70s this gentleman friend is considering selling some of his vast collection. His home is well hidden – a simple old Aussie country house set amid paddocks where a tame kangaroo family live close to the house and a huge billabong filled with birds, bordered by wonderful trees he planted 30 years ago. Discreetly hidden is a huge locked container. I can only wonder at what it must hold. His house was gobsmacking enough. Every corner and cupboard groaned under collections – antique fishing reels, scrimshaw, old native island carvings, first editions, a copper and brass pressure gauge from a famous submarine, Crimean war artifacts. Old weatherboard walls were hung with extraordinary art. The treasures included a set of John Gould’s personal collection of some of his original lithographs including the magnificent thylacine. Apparently he commented when drawing the Tasmanian tiger in the 1800s that it was a doomed creature. These originals are expected to fetch hefty prices but the collector has agreed to a limited set of prints, painstakingly made from Gould’s originals to go on sale as well. Gould was amazing - a businessman, publisher and obsessive bird collector. When a teenage apprentice in the royal gardens at Windsor he sold stuffed birds to the sons of the aristocracy at Eton College. By the time he was 21 he had set up his own taxidermy business in London before turning to art and lithography.
It’s estimated that over half a million individual hand-coloured plates were produced under the Gould name. It is an irony that a man who never finished a picture is remembered as one of the most significant bird artists of the Victorian age.
It was a fascinating morning and I came away intrigued at how one man, with not a lot of money, has accumulated such an extraordinary collection. Every piece has its own story – who made it, where it came from and how it came into the hands of the collector.
Cheers.
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