As a result of an 18-month expedition to the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and Gabon between 1816 and 1818, Sarah Bowdich was the first women to collect plant specimens in tropical West Africa and the first to discover entirely new genera of plants. Left stranded in Gambia following her husband's death during their second expedition to the continent in 1824, she returned to London to discover her friends had started a collection to support her burgeoning career in natural history.
In 1826, she began to work on what would become her most famous publication, The Fresh-water fishes of Great Britain. This rare work is one of only 50 copies produced. It was a mammoth endeavour; Bowdich worked on drawing and hand-painting each individual plate 'from the living fish immediately [after] it came from the water it inhabited' and published the work in twelve parts of four plates each. Despite the pressure of producing the plates in this way, the illustrations are remarkable. Unlike in other histories of fish, the paintings are lifelike and highly accurate, with the sheen of the scales and the translucency of the fins of each fish being effectively reproduced.

Illustrated here is the European perch (Perca fluvialis), a fish Bowdich remarked was, on account of its 'ferocious appearance' and its golden hue, 'one of our finest freshwater fishes'