John Gould was the son of a gardener at Windsor Castle. In 1827, he was hired by the Zoological Society as a taxidermist. A man of immense energy, shrewd and ambitious, he went on to become one of the 19th century’s major publishers of natural history. No artist himself, he relied entirely on the talent of his wife Elizabeth, as well as that of the illustrators he hired. What he lacked in artistic skills, however, he made up for in business acumen; his publications, unlike Lear’s, were great financial successes, and he became a wealthy man.

It’s easy to imagine John Gould’s glee at discovering the naive, impecunious, and prodigiously talented Lear sketching away in the Parrot House. The professional relationship which followed was not so much a collaboration as seven years of exploitation. Gould immediately seized on the beauty of the folio format Lear had pioneered in the Psittacidae; he used it himself in all of his own publications. Gould’s first book, A Century of Birds from the Himalayan Mountains, was published in 1832; Lear drew all of the backgrounds for Elizabeth Gould’s illustrations, and trained her in lithography, but his work is not credited. In 1834, Lear contributed ten brilliant plates to Gould’s A Monograph of the Ramphastidae, or Family of Toucans; he is not acknowledged, and, in fact, his signature is actually erased from the plates in the second edition. Gould apparently felt that once he had paid Lear for his work, it became his own; many of the plates which Lear created for The Birds of Europe are inscribed, “Drawn from Life by J&E Gould.”

In all, Lear contributed to six of Gould’s works: A Century of Birds from the Himalayan Mountains; A Monograph of The Ramphastidae, or Family of Toucans; The Birds of Europe; The Birds of Australia; Icones Avium; and A Monograph of the Trogonidae, or Family of Trogons.

After Gould’s death in 1881, Lear wrote, "He was one I never liked really, for in spite of a certain jollity and bonhommie, he was a harsh and violent man. At the Zoological Society at 33 Bruton Street, at Hullmandel's—at Broad Street ever the same, persevering hard working toiler in his own line, but ever as unfeeling for those about him. In this earliest phase of this bird drawing, he owed everything to his excellent wife,—& to myself, without whose help in drawing he had done nothing."