The story of the bird
The King is the second largest penguin and, to many eyes, the most beautiful. Where the Emperor wears its gold as a soft wash behind the ear, the King wears it as a statement: two vivid teardrop patches of orange that run from the crown down the neck and bleed into a wash of buttery yellow across the upper chest, with a matching stripe of orange laid along the lower bill. Against the silver-grey back and the clean white front, it is the most richly coloured penguin in the world.
It breeds on the sub-Antarctic islands, South Georgia chief among them, in colonies that can run to hundreds of thousands of birds. Its breeding cycle is one of the longest of any bird, more than a year from egg to fledging, so that a single pair raises a chick roughly twice every three years. The brown, woolly chicks were once so unlike their parents that early sailors logged them as a separate species, the “oakum boys.”
On the page the King is pure portrait. Upright, composed, the orange drawn with the same care given to a tanager or an oriole, the whole bird carried by that one warm gradient from bill to breast. It is the penguin that looks, more than any other, as though it knows the title it was given.
Paper and finish
Available in three sizes on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308gsm, an archival cotton rag with a soft matte surface. Printed by Prodigi with pigment inks rated 100+ years under display conditions. Framed prints are glazed, no mat, in black, white or natural.
