Kingfisher Fine Art Print
A high quality fine art print on Hahnemühle German Etching art paper of a pair of Common Kingfishers, painted by wildlife painter Peter Paillou (c.1720-1790).
Superb Kingfisher Fine Art Print on Museum-Quality Paper
We've meticulously reproduced Kingfisher 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 Kingfisher 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 Kingfisher
Our Kingfisher comes from the original collection of Taylor White F.R.S. (1701-1772). In the mid-18th Century, White commissioned the celebrated wildlife painter Peter Paillou (c.1720 - c.1790) to paint a number of specimens for his collection. The watercolour of the Kingfisher was among the works Paillou produced for White.
The original Kingfisher watercolour is finely painted, with remarkable detail, allowing the plumage and features of the Kingfisher 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 Kingfisher, 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 Common Kingfisher
This 18th Century watercolour of the Common Kingfisher (Alcedo atthis) is the work of Peter Paillou, one of the natural history painters whose studies form the Taylor White Collection. Painted from close observation at a time when few people would ever have seen the bird at rest, it records the kingfisher’s colouring with a precision that photography would not match for another century.
Description of the Kingfisher
The Common Kingfisher is a small bird of freshwater margins, found across Europe, Asia, northern Africa and the Middle East. It favours slow-moving rivers, lakes and streams where small fish are plentiful, and is most often glimpsed as a flash of blue low over the water rather than seen properly at all. Adults measure roughly 16 to 19 cm in length, with a wingspan of 25 to 30 cm. The male carries a brilliant azure-blue back and head; the female’s upperparts tend more towards green. Both sexes share the same warm orange underparts, the contrast that makes the species so immediately recognisable.
Much of that colour is structural rather than pigmented. The blue of the back shifts between azure and near-turquoise depending on the angle of the light, which is precisely the difficulty a painter working in watercolour must resolve, and one reason a still, deliberate study of this kind carries information a fleeting sighting cannot.
The Kingfisher’s Hunting and Breeding Practices
The kingfisher hunts from a perch overhanging the water, waiting with unusual patience before diving headfirst to take small fish, aquatic insects and crustaceans in its long, dagger-like bill. Nesting takes place underground: pairs excavate a tunnel into a soft riverbank, at the end of which the female lays five to seven eggs. Breeding runs from roughly March to August, with both parents sharing incubation over some nineteen to twenty-one days.
Paillou worked in a period when British natural history illustration was moving from decorative convention towards genuine scientific record, and his birds sit firmly on the observational side of that shift. Plumage, posture and the set of the bill are all treated as things to be reported accurately rather than arranged for effect. The result is a study that still reads as a reliable likeness some two and a half centuries after it was made, and one that holds its own as a piece of drawing quite apart from its documentary value.
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