John P. O'Neill (b. 1942)
Green Honeycreeper and other birds, 1972
signed and dated "O'Neill 72" lower right
watercolor, 18 1/2 by 14 1/2 in.

John P. O'Neill began painting bird illustrations as a graduate student in Zoology at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in the 1970s. In 1973 he co-illustrated A Guide to the Birds of Trinidad and Tobago with Don Eckelberry, and he had an exhibition of his paintings at LSU in 1979. As an artist, O'Neill went on to be Artist of the Year for Mass Audubon and participated in the "Birds in Art" exhibit at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Museum. In his career as a zoologist, he described fourteen new species of birds and published The Birds of Peru in 2007, the culmination of over forty years of research. He directed the LSU Museum of Natural Science and regularly took groups of ornithologists on expeditions. O'Neill's life was the focus of the book A Parrot Without a Name, written in 1990 by Don Stap.

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