Lot Essay
Jacques Barraband is justly celebrated as the finest ornithological artist of his time. Drawings of flowers, insects and birds make up the greater part of the artist’s graphic work. His most important achievement was a series of more than 300 drawings in watercolor and bodycolor executed to illustrate François Levaillant’s monumental works of natural history and birds. This elegant drawing of a brown-throated parakeet was in Le Vaillant’s monumental dictionary of parakeets published in 1801. Today the brown-throated parakeet lives mainly in South America.