Ornithological insights from Taylor White's birds

The Taylor White Collection of paintings from the 1700s, held at the McGill University Library, includes 661 paintings that illustrate 832 birds from around the world. With illustrations of 443 species in 30 avian orders, this collection represents a substantial proportion of the bird species known at the time and is one of the most comprehensive and accurate collections of coloured bird illustrations made during the eighteenth century. Most of the paintings were made by Charles Collins and Peter Paillou from live birds or dead specimens in the cabinets and aviaries of White and his contemporaries. We compared a large sample of the paintings with the same birds depicted in modern bird guides to assess quantitatively the accuracy of the illustrations with respect to the colours and patterns of plumages and soft parts. We found that fewer than 3% of the paintings contained errors, and usually only in one of the 28 body regions that we assessed. Given this high level of accuracy, we identified a small red macaw from the West Indies as likely representing a previously unknown but now extinct subspecies of the Scarlet Macaw, and two other paintings of species that could not be convincingly matched to any known species.