Today is the birthday of English illustrator and naturalist Thomas Bewick. While Bewick is most famous for his illustrations of Aesop’s Fables, his History of British Quadrupeds, and (most famously) his History of British Birds, I decided in a pinch to post his illustrations of a book near and dear to me, the four-part descriptive poem in blank verse The Seasons by Scottish poet James Thomson, the recording of a Librivox audiobook for which was my summer project a few years ago. (You can listen to the result here.)

These illustrations come from this 1805 edition of The Seasons, courtesy of HathiTrust.

And here’s my Librivox recording of James Thomson’s The Seasons from a few years ago: