Frederick DuCane Godman: Biologia Centrali-Americana Prints
The English naturalist behind the 63-volume Biologia Centrali-Americana. The life of Frederick DuCane Godman, his partnership with Osbert Salvin, Keulemans’s bird plates, the mammals, beetles and butterflies of Central America, where to see his work and how to hang Godman prints at home. By Artwork Culture.
Frederick DuCane Godman (1834–1919) was the English naturalist who, with his Cambridge friend Osbert Salvin, set out to describe every living thing in Mexico and Central America. The result was the Biologia Centrali-Americana, issued in 215 parts from 1879 to 1915: 63 volumes, 1,677 lithographed plates and more than 50,000 species, about 19,000 of them new to science. Its bird plates, nearly all by the Dutch artist John Gerrard Keulemans, and its sheets of jewel-bright beetles and butterflies are some of the finest natural history prints of the Victorian age.
This guide covers Godman’s life, the 1861 journey to Guatemala that started it all, how the Biologia was made, its birds, mammals and insects, his petrels, pottery and gardens, where to see the books today, and how to hang Godman prints at home. Our Frederick DuCane Godman collection holds 814 plates from the Biologia: all 84 bird plates, 20 mammal plates, and hundreds of insect and spider sheets.
Who Was Frederick DuCane Godman?
Godman was a scientist, collector and patron first. He did not draw the plates that carry his name; he and Salvin planned the Biologia Centrali-Americana, paid for it, edited it and hired the leading specialists and artists of the day to describe and picture each group of animals and plants. That is why antique plates from the work are catalogued under his name, and why prints of them are sold under it. Browse the plates in our Frederick DuCane Godman collection.
How to spot a Biologia plate:
- A running head in script: the top left corner of every plate reads Biol. Centr.-Amer., with the volume, such as Aves or Lepidoptera Rhopal., and the plate number at top right.
- Birds in pairs on a branch: the bird plates usually show a male and female, or two related species, on a mossy twig against soft grey foliage, like the pair of orioles in our hero image.
- Insects in neat rows: beetles, bugs and butterflies are laid out in grids of 20 to 40 figures, each numbered, with a printed key to the species below.
- Soft, true colour: the plates are lithographs, many of them coloured by hand, with the cream paper left bare around the subject.
A Brewing Fortune and a Cambridge Friendship
Godman was born on 15 January 1834 at Park Hatch, near Godalming in Surrey, one of thirteen children of Joseph Godman, a partner in the brewers Whitbread & Co. That family fortune later helped pay for the Biologia. Poor health cut short his time at Eton, and he was taught at home before touring the Mediterranean and the Black Sea at 18.
In 1853 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met two men who shaped his life: the zoologist Alfred Newton and Osbert Salvin (1835–1898), who became his partner for the next forty years. On 17 November 1858 Godman, Salvin and Newton were among the twenty founders of the British Ornithologists’ Union, which met in Newton’s rooms at Magdalene College and launched the journal The Ibis the next year. Godman later served the union as secretary and, from 1896 to 1913, as president.
Guatemala, 1861: The Trip That Started It All
Salvin had already collected birds in Guatemala, and in 1861 Godman joined him there, sailing via Jamaica to Guatemala and Belize. Fever forced him home early, but the trip gave both men a lasting fascination with the forests, volcanoes and cloud forest birds of the region. Godman also travelled to Norway in 1857, the Azores in 1865, which led to his Natural History of the Azores (1870), and the Canary Islands and Madeira in 1871.
Over the following years Godman and Salvin built up huge collections from Mexico and Central America, from their own trips and from paid collectors. In 1876 they decided to publish all of it in one great work. For later Victorian bird art on the same lines, see our John Gould and Henry Seebohm collections.
The Biologia Centrali-Americana
The Biologia Centrali-Americana, or Contributions to the Knowledge of the Fauna and Flora of Mexico and Central America, was privately issued in 215 parts between 1879 and 1915, and bound as 63 volumes. It covers the region from Mexico to Panama, and was written by the leading specialists of the day, each taking one group: birds, mammals, reptiles and fishes, beetles, butterflies, spiders, plants. Godman and Salvin edited the whole, with an archaeology section by Alfred Maudslay on the Maya ruins.
To fill gaps, the editors bought other naturalists’ collections, including the beetles of Henry Walter Bates, the Amazon explorer, and sent collectors into the field, among them the entomologist George Charles Champion, who worked in Guatemala and Panama. Salvin died in 1898, before the work was done, and Godman saw it through to its introductory volume in 1915, helped on the birds by Richard Bowdler Sharpe and W. R. Ogilvie-Grant.
The Bird Plates: Keulemans in Central America
The four Aves volumes by Salvin and Godman, issued from 1879 to 1904, have 84 lithographed plates, first coloured by hand. All but two are by John Gerrard Keulemans (1842–1912), the Dutch artist who worked in London for most of the leading bird writers of his day; the other two are credited to Edward Neale. Keulemans drew from skins in the editors’ cabinet, setting each bird on a branch or patch of ground with a soft wash of leaves behind. See more of his work in our John Gerrard Keulemans collection.
Our collection has all 84 bird plates. Look for the hummingbirds of Plate 56, the woodpeckers of Plate 65, the barred owl of Plate 66, the falcons of Plate 71, the black guan of Plate 76, the wood-quails of Plate 79 and the tinamou of Plate 83. Our plate numbers follow the order of the scans, not always the printed numbers, since the original set includes extra plates such as 15a and 58a.
Mammals of Mexico and Central America
The Mammalia volume, written by the Scottish zoologist Edward Richard Alston with an introduction by Philip Lutley Sclater, came out in 1879–82 with 22 plates, 20 of them in colour. Keulemans drew at least some of them, including a tapir plate lithographed by M. & N. Hanhart in 1879. Our 20 mammal prints are those 20 colour plates.
They range from a howler monkey and a squirrel monkey to a ringtail with a banded tail, a manatee, tree squirrels, a pair of agoutis, an armadillo and a small opossum with young on her back. Unlike the birds, most are wide landscape plates, which suit a sofa wall or a long hallway. Browse more in our animal art prints.
Beetles, Butterflies and Spiders
Insects make up most of the Biologia. The beetles alone fill seven volumes in many parts, written by Bates, Champion, David Sharp, Martin Jacoby and others, and Godman and Salvin wrote the butterflies themselves. The moths were described by Herbert Druce, and the spiders by the Reverend Octavius Pickard-Cambridge and his nephew Frederick.
These sheets read as pattern as much as science. Try the round, spotted beetles of Coleoptera Plate 286, the longhorn beetles of Plate 211, the blue butterflies of Rhopalocera Plate 49, the purple and brown butterflies of Plate 13, the eyespot moths of Heterocera Plate 17, the cicadas of Homoptera Plate 1, and the long-legged spiders of Araneidea Plate 25.
For more insect art, see our insect art prints and butterfly art prints, and the earlier insect plates of Maria Sibylla Merian and John Obadiah Westwood.
Petrels, Pottery and South Lodge
Godman’s last big book was A Monograph of the Petrels (Order Tubinares), published in two volumes from 1907 to 1910 with hand-coloured plates by Keulemans. He also collected art: more than 600 pieces of early Iranian, Iznik and Hispano-Moresque pottery, catalogued privately in 1901. His daughter Catherine left the collection to the British Museum on her death in 1982.
At South Lodge, his house at Lower Beeding near Horsham in Sussex, he grew rhododendrons, orchids and alpine plants, and shared a friendly rivalry with his neighbour Sir Edmund Loder of Leonardslee. The house is now the South Lodge hotel. He married twice: Edith Elwes, sister of his friend the plant collector Henry John Elwes, in 1873, who died in 1875; and in 1891 Alice Mary Chaplin, later Dame Alice Godman of the British Red Cross.
Godman’s Legacy
Godman died at his London home in Pont Street on 19 February 1919, aged 85, and was buried at Cowfold in Sussex. He had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1882, served as a trustee of the British Museum, and received the Linnean Society’s gold medal in 1918. The British Ornithologists’ Union created the Godman-Salvin Medal in his and Salvin’s honour in 1919, and still awards it.
Animals named after him include Godman’s tree frog, the pit viper Cerrophidion godmani, the butterfly Heliconius godmani and the silk moth Antheraea godmani. For art lovers, his legacy is the plates: Keulemans’s birds and the precise insect sheets made the Biologia a standard of Victorian scientific illustration. For the same tradition, see Joseph Wolf, Edward Lear and Ernst Haeckel.
Famous Biologia Centrali-Americana Plates
Below are the plates to know, each with the matching print in our collection.
Aves Pl 34
Keulemans’s pair of yellow and black orioles, the hero of this guide. Shop the print.
Aves Pl 40
The royal flycatcher with its scarlet fan crest raised. Shop the print.
Aves Pl 56
A cluster of green and violet hummingbirds on a leafy spray. Shop the print, or the nightjar of Plate 62.
Aves Pl 66
A round-headed owl with rufous barring and dark eyes. Shop the print, or the falcons of Plate 71.
Mammalia Pl 07
The Central American tapir, the largest land mammal of the region. Shop the print.
Mammalia Pl 18
The nine-banded armadillo, in a dry, rocky landscape. Shop the print, or the ringtail.
Rhopalocera Pl 073
Black and yellow swallowtails with long tails. Shop the print, or the brown and violet butterflies of Plate 7.
Homoptera Pl 01
Cicadas with clear, veined wings in rows. Shop the print.
What Our Godman Prints Show
Our Frederick DuCane Godman collection lists 814 products, all plates from the Biologia Centrali-Americana. The chart groups them by the volume named in each title.
Beetles make up 301 of 814 plates, which mirrors the book itself, where Coleoptera was by far the largest section. Butterflies and moths add 214 more. The 84 bird plates and 20 mammals are the most decorative single-subject prints; the insect sheets are best for grids and pattern walls.
Where to See Godman’s Books and Collections
Godman’s legacy survives in three places: the specimens he gave to the British Museum, now at the Natural History Museum, his pottery collection at the British Museum, and the Biologia itself, which libraries keep in their rare book rooms and have scanned in full.
The main places to look:
London · Natural History Museum
The Natural History Museum holds the Godman and Salvin collections given to the British Museum from 1885, including the type specimens behind many Biologia descriptions. Most are in the research collections, open to scientists by appointment.
London · British Museum
The British Museum holds the Godman collection of Islamic pottery, more than 600 pieces of Iranian, Iznik and Hispano-Moresque ware, left to it by his daughter Catherine.
Online · Biodiversity Heritage Library
The Biodiversity Heritage Library has the full Biologia Centrali-Americana, scanned by the Smithsonian, free to read and download.
Online · Smithsonian Libraries
The Smithsonian Libraries’ digital edition lets you browse the Biologia volume by volume, with lists of the genera on each plate.
How to Decorate With Godman Prints
Biologia plates are calm and precise: soft colour on warm cream paper, with a script running head and plenty of white space. They look best in thin black, oak or gold frames with a wide off-white mat, hung in pairs or grids.
- Make a cabinet-of-curiosities wall. Mix a bird, a mammal and an insect sheet, such as the orioles, the tapir and the scarab beetles, in a grid of three or six for a study or library.
- Build a beetle grid. Six or nine Coleoptera plates in matching frames, like Plate 16, Plate 211 and Plate 286, read as pattern in a modern hallway or office.
- Add colour with butterflies. The swallowtails and blues brighten a white or grey bedroom or nursery.
- Give a long wall a landscape. The wide mammal plates, like the manatee, agoutis and armadillo, suit the space above a sofa, sideboard or bed.
- Pair the birds. Hang two bird plates side by side, such as the royal flycatcher and the blue jay, either side of a mirror or window.
For a full natural history room, mix Godman with Audubon, Gould, Catesby and Temminck. For plants alongside, add Elizabeth Blackwell, and for Mexican subjects browse our Mexican art prints.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Frederick DuCane Godman?
Frederick DuCane Godman (1834–1919) was an English ornithologist, entomologist and collector. With Osbert Salvin he edited the Biologia Centrali-Americana, a 63-volume natural history of Mexico and Central America, and he was a founder of the British Ornithologists’ Union and its president from 1896 to 1913.
Did Godman draw the plates himself?
No. Godman edited the work and wrote parts of the text. Most bird plates were drawn by John Gerrard Keulemans, with two by Edward Neale, and the insect and other plates were drawn and lithographed by other artists of the day.
What is the Biologia Centrali-Americana?
It is a natural history of Mexico and Central America, issued in 215 parts from 1879 to 1915 and bound as 63 volumes. It has 1,677 lithographed plates and treats 50,263 species, 19,263 of them described as new.
How many bird plates are in the Biologia?
The Aves volumes have 84 lithographed plates, nearly all by J. G. Keulemans. Artwork Culture sells prints of all 84.
What happened to Godman’s collections?
From 1885 Godman and Salvin gave their bird and butterfly collections to the British Museum; they are now at the Natural History Museum in London. His Islamic pottery went to the British Museum through his daughter Catherine’s will.
Where can I read the Biologia Centrali-Americana?
All volumes were scanned by the Smithsonian and are free to read on the Biodiversity Heritage Library and on the Smithsonian Libraries’ digital edition.
Where can I buy Frederick DuCane Godman art prints?
Artwork Culture sells archival wall art prints of 814 plates from the Biologia Centrali-Americana, in sizes from 4×6 to 40×60 inches. Browse the Frederick DuCane Godman collection or our bird art prints.
Written by Artwork Culture. Image credits: all artwork images are Artwork Culture product photos of Frederick DuCane Godman prints from the Biologia Centrali-Americana; the bird plates were drawn by John Gerrard Keulemans (two by Edward Neale). Details were checked against Wikipedia, the Smithsonian Libraries’ digital edition of the Biologia Centrali-Americana, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the National Library of Ireland catalogue, the Royal Society picture library, dealer and auction notes on the Aves volumes, and Wikidata in October 2026; museum displays change, so confirm before you visit.