In 1830, visitors to the new Zoological Gardens in London were bemused by a young man—a boy, really—who sat sketching the birds in the Parrot House. He drew the birds as they perched and played, and with the help of a zookeeper named Gosse, measured their wingspans, and the dimensions of their bodies, beaks, and legs. Visitors lingered to watch, and he filled the margins of his paper with caricatures of the people around him.

Edward Lear was working on a startlingly audacious project. Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots was a monograph he planned to publish by subscription in fourteen folios. It was ground-breaking in several ways: Lear was the first ornithological illustrator to publish in the large folio size, and the first to devote an entire book to a single family of birds. His insistence on drawing from life whenever possible was innovative, as was his decision to use lithography.

Lear published the first two folios of the Psittacidae on November 1, 1830. They were met with immediate acclaim; on November 2, he was nominated as an Associate of the Linnean Society. He continued to work on the Psittacidae for the next year and a half. But Lear was no businessman. It was difficult for him to collect payment from his subscribers. He worked obsessively on his lithographs and with the colorists, and then struggled to pay his studio bills. He abandoned the Psittacidae after the twelfth folio; the project was an artistic triumph, but a financial failure.