Henrik Grönvold (1858–1940) was a Danish bird illustrator.
Grönvold developed an interest in natural history at a young age, and would spend his time drawing the birds and animals around him. After studying drawing in Copenhagen he went on to work as a draughtsman for the Danish artillery from 1880.
Grönvold left his native country for America. He travelled via England, arriving in London in 1893 where he found employment at the Natural History Museum as an 'articulator' preparing bird skeletons on wire armatures. Gronvold's Swedish wife, Josefine, followed a year later. Gronvold became a skilled taxidermist, and established a reputation as an artist. Gronvold worked at the Museum for a few years before leaving to accompany William Ogilvie-Grant on his expedition to the Salvage Islands in 1895. On his return, Gronvold continued to work at the Museum in an unofficial capacity as an artist for many more years.
By the end of the nineteenth century Gronvold’s illustrations were appearing in numerous scientific publications including the Proceedings and Transactions of the Zoological Society, Ibis and the Avicultural Magazine for whom he draw plates for George Albert Boulenger, William Ogilvie-Grant, Michael Rogers Oldfield Thomas (1858-1929) and C. I. Forsyth (1843-1923) among others. Gronvold also completed numerous plates for Walter Rothschild, many of which appeared in Rothschild’s journal Novitates Zoologicae. Gronvold also produced many plates of bird eggs, which were quite unusual and rarely featured in early bird books. Some of these plates included those of the eggs of the Great Auk that he completed for the English zoologist Alfred Newton (1829-1907).
Grönvold also illustrated Captain George Shelley’s Birds of Africa, completing 57 plates of many species that had not been illustrated before. Other publications that featured Gronvold’s work include W. L. Buller’s The Birds of New Zealand, Brabourne’s Birds of South America, McConnell’s Birds of British Guiana and H. K. Swann’s A Monograph of the Birds of Prey (1930-45). He also completed 600 hand-coloured plates for twelve volumes of The Birds of Australia (1910-27) for the wealthy Australian Gregory Macalister Mathews for which J. G. Keulemans also contributed. Gronvold subsequently provided numerous illustrations for Mathews’ The Birds of Norfolk and Lord Howe Islands … (1928) and A Supplement to The Birds of Norfolk and Lord Howe Islands … (1936) – some of the last publications that were issued with hand-coloured plates.
Such was his contributions to bird art that a Mirafara lark was named for him in 1930. Gronvold died at Bedford in 1940. He was survived by his wife Josefine, and daughter Elsa, who had become a skilled portrait painter.
Grönvold provided the illustrations for Henry Eliot Howard's The British Warblers (1907-14), Charles William Beebe's A Monograph of the Pheasants (1918-22), and Herbert Christopher Robinson's The Birds of the Malay Peninsula (1929-76).
[1] Natural History Museum page on Gronvold