John Gould was born in Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast in 1804 but was brought up in Surrey and later Windsor, where his father was one of the gardeners at the castle. The young Gould taught himself taxidermy from an early age and soon established a skill for the craft. Following a brief 18-month stint as gardener at Ripley Hall in Yorkshire, in 1824, he moved to London to establish a shop in the city.

The taxidermy enterprise was a successful one and Gould counted important public figures, including George IV (for whom he stuffed a pet giraffe in 1826), among his clients. In 1828, he won a competition to become taxidermist at the museum of the Zoological Society of London and eventually became the curator of the museum where he developed connections with some of the most prominent naturalists of the day and received specimens from around the world to preserve and prepare for display. He was also noted for his own knowledge of ornithology and in 1836 assisted Charles Darwin in understanding the specimens collected from the Beagle voyage to the Galapagos, demonstrating that the birds collected were not different species as Darwin initially thought, but varieties of the same species, thus inspiring his revolutionary theory of natural selection.

Gould began to publish fine ornithological volumes from 1830. They are among the most famous and important 'bird-books' of the nineteenth century and the volumes in the Royal Library were subscribed to by Prince Albert and Queen Victoria.

From 1873, Gould focused on the birds of Great Britain. This was the most popular of his works, perhaps due to his primarily British audience but also due to plates showing native birds with their young, lithographed by Henry Richter from drawings by the premier natural history artist of the day, Joseph Wolf.