Mauritius Dodo Fine Art Print
A high quality fine art print on Hahnemühle German Etching art paper of a female Mauritius Dodo, painted by wildlife painter Charles Collins (c.1680-1744) in 1736.
Superb Dodo Fine Art Print on Museum-Quality Paper
We've meticulously reproduced Mauritius Dodo 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 Mauritius Dodo 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 Dodo
Our Dodo 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 Dodo was among the works Collins produced for White.
The original Dodo watercolour is finely painted, with remarkable detail, allowing the plumage and features of the Dodo 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 Dodo, 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 Mauritius Dodo
The Dodo (Raphus cucullatus), also recorded as the Mauritius Dodo, is the subject of this watercolour by Charles Collins, painted in 1736 for the natural history collection assembled by Taylor White.
The Range of the Dodo
The Dodo was endemic to Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean roughly 500 miles east of Madagascar. Despite its heavy, ungainly reputation, it belonged to the pigeon family, Columbidae, and its closest surviving relative is the Nicobar pigeon of South East Asia. Standing around seventy centimetres tall, it was flightless, ground-nesting and, having evolved on an island with no land predators, entirely unafraid of people.
The Extinction of teh Dodo
Dutch sailors recorded the bird in 1598, and within a single human lifetime it was gone. The last widely accepted sighting was in 1662. Hunting by visiting crews played a part, but the more decisive damage came from the animals those crews brought with them. Pigs, rats, macaques and cats took eggs and young from nests on the forest floor, while clearance of the lowland forest removed the habitat the species depended on. The Dodo has since become the defining emblem of human-caused extinction, and the phrase “as dead as a Dodo” has long outlived the bird itself.
The Painting of the Dodo
Collins was working in 1736, some seventy years after the last reliable sighting, so this watercolour cannot have been made from life. Artists of the period depicting the Dodo relied instead on 17th Century paintings, particularly those of Roelandt Savery, on descriptions in published travel accounts, and on the small number of surviving physical remains. The result is a record of how the Dodo was understood in the 18th Century rather than how it appeared in the wild, which is part of what makes such images historically valuable: they preserve the scientific imagination of their moment as much as the animal.
The painting sits within the Taylor White Collection, a body of 18th Century natural history watercolours commissioned by Taylor White (1701 to 1772) and now held by McGill University Library. Collins was among the principal artists White employed, and his work across the collection combines careful observation with the compositional restraint typical of the period. Here that restraint gives the Dodo an unexpected dignity, presenting a bird more often caricatured as a study worth taking seriously.
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