COUNTRY LIFE
WAR seems to bring out some of the most gentle and pleasing of English characteristics. Within a German prison camp Mr. John Buxton, organising his companions (sancta cohors comitunz) into an observation group, collected material for perhaps the- best of monographs on birds. It seems that several redstarts built within sight of the wire cage. About the same time, to escape boredom, Squadron-Leader Harvey began to develop a new form of art of his own designing. He took to making miniature birds, foxes, bears, mice and such, out of various fragments of botanical growth. The results are being exhibited for the second year at the Medici Gallery, 7 Grafton Street. They are of quite a singu- lar daintiness and accuracy. I have been examining some of them very closely, not only under an aesthetic stimulus, but in an attempt to detect the botanical material. The blue tits, for example (clinging to a bough against a pleasingly blue painted background), owe, I should guess, some of the perfection of their colouring and tissue to the pussy willow. The marsh tits (in spite of their minuteness, less than an inch) are as accurately coloured. The artist has acquired, I believe, in the course of his craft, the profound conviction that "almost every part of an animal's anatomy can be matched by a seed " ; I would add, most feathers by a catkin. The neatness of the work could not be rivalled even by a long-tailed tit or chaffinch, those master builders on a larger scale.
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