Signed and dated 1784, watercolour and bodycolour on paper, 40.5cm x 27.5cm (49.5cm x 38cm including frame). *SARAH STONE C.1760-1844 Sarah Stone was a naturalist painter specialising in brilliantly cloured and elegantly composed water-colours of exotic birds, although she also painted other animals and ethnographic subjects. Some consider her studies of birds second only to those of Audøbon. She was the daughter of a fan painter and was born in London in or about 1760. Her initial and probably only training was from her father. Her technique as a natural history watercolourist reflects the curious demands of the fan-painters' trade. She usually uses a highly prepared (sized) paper, and has a technique akin to that of a miniaturist, where the emphasis is on a punctilious precision and exactitude, but with a lively palette of well-saturated colours. From the age of about 17, Stone visited the Museum of Sir Ashton Lever, a Lancastrian landowner who put together the largest collection of Natural History specimens of the age, which was open to the public in the vast Leicester House, which he rented for the purpose (in 1787 the museum moved to the Rotunda in Albion Place, London, on the south bank of the Thames). Lever soon engaged her to paint the specimens for his own use, and over the next fifteen or so years he assembled a remarkable collection of her work. About 900 of some 1,000 of these watercolours survive today, most notably in The Natural History Museum, London. She married Midshipman, later Captain, John Langdale Smith in 1789, the same year that she painted Australian birds, reptiles and mammals from specimens brought back to England by the First Fleet surgeon John White. These were subsequently published in his work entitled Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales. Stone died in London aged 82 on 11th January 1844. She is buried at St. Margaret's, Westminster. Condition: Professional work has been undertaken by Abbott & Holder, nether the less there is foxing & fading in places, particularly in the background rather than the plumage of the parrot. Category: Art/Paintings Estimate: 2500-3000 GBP