Prideaux John Selby was very gifted as an artist, and the two volumes of Illustrations of British Ornithology are outstandingly beautiful. In many people's estimation, the clarity and crispness of his figures give them an austere beauty that is lacking in the pretty lithographs of say, John Gould. The cool, classic quality of Selby's plates belongs to the age of elegance and could never have been achieved by the Victorian John Gould. Selby's bird figures were the most accurate delineations of British birds to that date, and the liveliest. After so many books with small, stiff bird portraits, this new atlas with its life-size figures and mor relaxed drawing was a great achievement in the long history of bird illustration, and a testament to the aesthetic of his time.
