Government stop £1.2million photo albums by English ornithologist John Gould being sold overseas

Born in Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast in 1804, John Gould was brought up in Surrey and later Windsor, where his father was a gardener at the monarch’s castle.

Gould taught himself taxidermy – the practice of preserving an animal’s body by stuffing or mounting – from an early age. 

In 1824, he moved to London to establish a shop in the city, after a brief stint as a gardener.

His taxidermy enterprise proved successful and his clients included King George IV, for whom he stuffed a pet giraffe in 1826.

In 1828, Gould won a competition to become a taxidermist at the Zoological Society’s museum in London.

He eventually became the institution’s curator and developed connections with some of the most prominent naturalists of the time, including Charles Darwin.

Born in Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast in 1804, John Gould was brought up in Surrey and later Windsor, where his father was a gardener at the monarch’s castle

In 1836, he assisted the famous scientist in understanding the specimens he had collected from the Beagle voyage to the Galapagos.

He demonstrated to Darwin that the birds he had collected were not different species but varieties of the same species.  

This inspired Darwin’s revolutionary theory of natural selection.

 In 1838, Gould quit his job with the Zoological Society and moved with his family to Australia so he could collect specimens of Australian wildlife in person.

There he made sketches and collected many different species of birdlife and mammals.

On returning to the UK in 1840, Gould settled in Surrey and set about publishing the work he had collated. 

Even though he then lost his wife from an illness following childbirth, Gould published The Birds of Australia in seven folio volumes between 1840 and 1848.

The landmark work illustrated a variety of the wildlife of the Australian outback, including kangaroos, wallabies and koalas. 

Gould passed away aged 76 in 1881.  

Source: The Royal Collection Trust.