Mark Catesby, English, born Essex, - The Great Booby (An Thymelaea foliis obtusis, Anseri Bassano & c.) - 1727-1731 - T-Shirt

This design reproduces Mark Catesby's hand-coloured copperplate engraving of the Great Booby, a seabird he documented during the 1720s and early 1730s.

Visual Elements & Composition

Cream paper fills most of the plate, giving the image a soft, aged ground. The bird's head sits in profile in warm brown, its long pointed bill extending across the frame. Beside it, a flowering shrub branch of oval leaves, sage green and tan, rises from the lower edge, with a tuft of grass and a slate grey band of water along the horizon. The composition is set inside a rectangular plate, and the engraved caption reads An Thymelaea foliis obtusis and Anseri Baffano &c., with the plate number T 86 beneath.

Meaning & Symbolism

Catesby pictured each species as a specimen to be studied, so the bird and the plant share the same careful attention. Pairing an animal with a botanical sprig and its habitat reflects the Enlightenment impulse to catalogue and understand the natural world. Catesby was an English naturalist and artist whose publications recorded the flora and fauna of the New World, and this plate belongs to that effort to make distant ecosystems knowable to European readers.

On This Tee

The artwork is a profile study, so it reads best at chest height, where the bird's head and bill can be seen in full. The engraved caption and plate number work as a label beneath the image, and the open cream ground keeps the composition calm on a plain garment. Wearing it puts a naturalist's record of a seabird in plain view, which is the same way Catesby intended his plates to be read.