Peacock Fine Art Print
A high quality fine art print on Hahnemühle German Etching art paper of a Peacock, painted by wildlife painter Peter Paillou (c.1720-1790) in the early 18th Century.
Superb Peacock Fine Art Print on Museum-Quality Paper
We've meticulously reproduced Peacock 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 Peacock 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 Peacock
Our Peacock 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 Peacock was among the works Paillou produced for White.
The original Peacock watercolour is finely painted, with remarkable detail, allowing the plumage and features of the Peacock 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 Peacock, 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 Peacock
The peacock, Pavo cristatus, is one of the most immediately recognisable birds in the world, and one of the few whose appearance has been shaped as much by human admiration as by natural selection. Peter Paillou’s watercolour captures the male in full ornamental splendour, painted at a time when European naturalists were working to record exotic species with a new level of accuracy.
The Peacock’s Range
Strictly speaking, the subject is the Indian Peafowl. “Peacock” refers to the male of the species, while the female is the peahen. Native to the Indian subcontinent, where it has been kept and revered for millennia, the bird was carried across the world by trade and by the fashion for ornamental collections. Introduced and feral populations are now established in parts of Europe, southern Africa and Australia.
The male’s plumage is the reason for that global journey. The neck and breast carry an iridescent blue that shifts with the angle of the light, an effect produced not by pigment but by the microscopic structure of the feathers themselves. The famous train, often mistaken for a tail, is formed from greatly elongated upper tail coverts marked with the ocelli, or eyespots, that give the display its character. Raised and fanned during courtship, the train can exceed the length of the bird’s body.
Paillou worked as a bird painter in Britain during the middle decades of the 18th Century and was among the artists whose watercolours form the Taylor White Collection. The collection, assembled by the naturalist and lawyer Taylor White and now held by McGill University Library, records birds, mammals and plants with a directness that belongs to natural history rather than decoration. Each subject is set plainly against the page, observed rather than staged.
That restraint is what gives the peacock study its quality. A bird so often reduced to spectacle is here treated as a specimen: measured, particular, and rendered with real attention to the structure beneath the colour.
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