Edward Hargitt

Edward Hargitt (3 May 1835 – 19 March 1895) was a Scottish ornithologist and landscape painter.

Biography

Edward Hargitt was born in Edinburgh, son of the composer Charles Hargitt. He studied art in the Royal Scottish Academy under Robert Scott Lauder, and painted landscapes, several of which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in Burlington House. After 1880 he specialised in watercolours, often of scenery in the Scottish Highlands, where he spent an increasing amount of his time birdwatching. He studied art under the Scottish landscape painter Horatio MacCulloch. In 1871, he became a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours. He contributed a painting to an 1882 book Bedford Park, celebrating the then-fashionable garden suburb of that name.

Hargitt became an ornithologist and developed into an expert on woodpeckers.

He was the author of the monograph on Picidae for the Catalogue of the Birds in the British Museum, published in 1890. During later years, he prepared 1300 drawings of woodpeckers for a proposed monograph. The original 1895 manuscript Book of Reference to the Picidae is kept in the State Darwin Museum in Moscow, Russia.

After his death, Christie, Manson & Woods auctioned more than 300 of his paintings, mainly watercolours, in 1896.