Chrysolophus pictus
This watercolour of the Golden Pheasant (Chrysolophus pictus) forms part of the Taylor White Collection, a series of 18th Century natural history studies now held by McGill University Library. Painted by Charles Collins, the work captures one of the most vividly coloured birds ever recorded by European natural history illustrators: a golden crest and rump set against a cape of orange and black, with deep russet, emerald and sapphire tones running through the wings and tail.
A Bird Built For Display
The Golden Pheasant is a member of the pheasant family, Phasianidae, and among the most ornately marked of all galliform birds. The male’s plumage serves a clear evolutionary purpose: an elaborate courtship display in which the golden crest is raised and the orange cape fanned outwards, framing the face during mating rituals. Females, by contrast, are mottled brown, providing camouflage during nesting. This stark difference between the sexes, known as sexual dimorphism, made the male bird an especially prized subject for artists and collectors alike, since no other pheasant species combined quite so many colours in a single plumage.
The Golden Pheasant’s Native Range and History In The West
The species is native to the mountainous, densely forested regions of central and western China, where it favours dense conifer or bamboo understorey and is more often heard than seen, preferring to run rather than fly when disturbed. Its scientific name, Chrysolophus pictus, derives from the Greek for “golden crested” and the Latin for “painted”, a fitting description of its appearance.
Golden Pheasants were largely unknown in Europe until living specimens began to reach Britain in the 18th Century, arriving via trade routes connecting China to European ports. Their rarity and exceptional colouring made them a sensation among naturalists and wealthy collectors, who kept them in aviaries and menageries as living curiosities. It was this same fascination that drove the demand for detailed scientific illustration: paintings such as this one served both as records of species newly encountered by Western science and as demonstrations of an artist’s skill in rendering colour and form with precision. The species proved hardy in captivity and has since established naturalised, or feral, populations in parts of Great Britain, continental Europe and New Zealand, descended from birds that escaped or were deliberately released from private collections.
The Taylor White Collection Glden Pheasant
This painting belongs to a body of work commissioned in the 18th Century to document birds, mammals and plants, many of them newly introduced to Britain through trade and exploration. Alongside fellow artists including Peter Paillou and Jacobus van Huysum, Charles Collins contributed to a collection that remains a valuable record of how naturalists of the period observed, classified and depicted the natural world, at a time when accurate illustration was often the only means of studying a species without direct access to a living or preserved specimen.
c.1680 - 1744
Charles Collins (c.1680-1744) was a painter of birds, mammals and still life, born in Dublin and trained in Ireland before establishing himself in London. He built his early reputation on still-life subjects, including a series of fruit studies for Robert Furber's Twelve Months of Fruit (1732), before turning increasingly to natural history illustration. From 1736, Collins worked alongside Peter Paillou to produce watercolours of British birds and mammals for the naturalist and collector Taylor White, contributing over 200 signed works to White's collection. His animal studies are noted for their lifelike composition, typically set against a grassy mound or tree stump rather than a plain background, and for the accuracy with which plumage and colouring were recorded from live or preserved specimens. Collins died in London in 1744, described at the time as Bird Painter to the Royal Society.
Credit: Taylor White Collection, Rare Books & Special Collections, McGill University Library.