Golden Pheasant Fine Art Print
A high quality fine art print on Hahnemühle German Etching art paper of a Golden Pheasant, painted by wildlife painter Charles Collins (c.1680-1744) in 1739.
Superb Golden Pheasant Fine Art Print on Museum-Quality Paper
We've meticulously reproduced Golden Pheasant Fine Art Print on museum-quality fine art paper, matched to size. The 6in x 8in print is produced on Enhanced Matte Art Paper [EMA], a heavy-duty fine art paper with a smooth, non-reflective finish. The 12in x 16in and 18in x 24in prints are produced on 310gsm Hahnemühle German Etching paper [HGE], an acid and lignin-free archival paper with a fine tooth, offering our highest level of detail and longevity.
Both papers are fade-resistant and colourfast, using pigment inks designed to preserve the clarity and depth of the original artwork for decades. Every print is produced to order from a high-resolution master file, ensuring sharp detail and accurate colour reproduction.
* Please note that images of Golden Pheasant Fine Art Print on our website are lower resolution copies of the originals, for illustrative purposes only. The actual print uses high-resolution source imagery to ensure a crisp, clear, and visually stunning final result.
The Taylor White Collection's 18th Century Watercolour Painting of the Golden Pheasant
Our Golden Pheasant comes from the original collection of Taylor White F.R.S. (1701-1772). In the mid-18th Century, White commissioned the celebrated wildlife painter Charles Collins (c.1680 - 1744) to paint a number of specimens for his collection. The watercolour of the Golden Pheasant was among the works Collins produced for White.
The original Golden Pheasant watercolour is finely painted, with remarkable detail, allowing the plumage and features of the Golden Pheasant to be seen in stunning clarity. This depth of colour and detail has been captured brilliantly through the digitisation process and is replicated here for your home or office decor, or as a thoughtful gift.
Taylor White, a barrister by profession and later Puisne Judge for Chester, was a keen naturalist and Fellow of the Royal Society, elected in 1725. Over nearly forty years from the 1730s until his death in 1772, he commissioned 938 watercolours of birds, mammals, fish and reptiles, including the Golden Pheasant, now held at McGill University and painted almost entirely by two artists, Charles Collins and Peter Paillou. White was a founding governor of The Foundling Hospital in London and served as its treasurer for the last twenty-five years of his life. His well-connected social and scientific circle gave his artists exceptional access to specimens: his second wife, Frances Armstrong, was the daughter of General John Armstrong, Governor of the Tower of London and Chief Royal Engineer, and White's artists painted the lions, wolves and other animals of the Royal Menagerie there. He also borrowed specimens from the British Museum, and received rare and exotic birds from friends, including the naturalist Joseph Banks, who sailed to Newfoundland in 1766, and William Harrison, who brought back specimens from voyages testing his father's marine chronometer.
The Golden Pheasant
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.
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