Gould named this pheasant after Robert Swinhoe (1836-1877), a dedicated naturalist who served with the British Consular Service in China and Formosa. In 1861, at the age of twenty-four, he was appointed Vice-Consul in Formosa and established an aviary stocked with pheasants and rare species from the interior mountain forests. The illustration was made from a male and a female specimen in the British Museum, collected by Swinhoe.
Swinhoe wrote to Gould on 22 September 1862 'On second consideration I think I would esteem it a favour both for private and public reasons if you would name the new Fireback Pheasant after me. I still leave it to your consideration but after my exertions I should like in some way to be identified with the avifauna of Formosa, and it would not perhaps be entirely vain in me to claim as specially mine own the most interesting bird that I have managed to introduce into the scientific world'.
This sketchy, forceful watercolour with rapid brushwork and pencil lines is probably a preparatory work by Gould. Richter's finished lithograph has more definition in the undergrowth, branches and foliage, the background female is bent further forward, and the leg of the foreground pheasant is brighter red. The image in the watercolour is in the same sense (ie. the same way round) as in the final plate.
The foreground male is about two-thirds lifesize.
R. Swinhoe, Gould Correspondence Box 8, Zoology Library MSS, Natural History Museum, London
J. Gould, Proceedings of the Zoological Society, 1862, p.284
R. Swinhoe, The Ibis, 1863, p.401
DISTRIBUTION: Mountain forests of Taiwan. Population small; probably declining and threatened by deforestation