Flights of fancy
John McEwen
BIRDS by Katrina Cook Quercus, £25, pp. 224, ISBN 9781847241993 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 BB’S BIRDS edited and introduced by Bryan Holden Roseworld, £35, pp. 215, limited edition 950 copies (de luxe edition, 50 copies, £145). Prices do not include postage. Available from Roseworld Productions Ltd, 8 Park Road, Solihull, West Midlands, B91 3SU, Tel: 0121 704 1002 ISBN 9780955313011 Did you know that the first person to cage a budgerigar was John Gould, the 19th-century English artist/naturalist? Or that the word ‘penguin’ is derived from the Welsh words ‘pen’ (white) and ‘gwyn’ (head)? Or that there is no scientific (in other words fossil) evidence that the dodo ever existed? These are just three informative nuggets from Katrina Cook’s entertaining text for her sumptuously illustrated elephant-folio-size history of bird art.
That Birds is as enjoyable to read as to look at reflects the author’s unusual combination of artistic and scientific talent: a bird artist, qualified bird ringer and curator at the Natural History Museum; a specialist in printing techniques, who has a particular interest in the art of John James Audubon (1785-1851), widely regarded as the supreme bird artist.
Birds is a pleasingly idiosyncratic pictorial history of the last 700 years of bird art and illustration. There are seven thematic and roughly chronological chapters, which give full rein to the author’s preferences. The peerless Audubon gets a chapter to himself and the evolution of print technology is a prominent narrative thread. For much of the 700 years covered, de luxe editions of fine-art bird books matched ornithological discoveries with the best bird artists for the delectation of rich connoisseurs. Most of these books are hidden away in the atmospherically controlled inner sanctums of the world’s greatest libraries.
The noble dimensions of Birds, albe it half the size of Audubon’s doubleelephant-folio Birds of America, is itself a reminder of this heroic tradition of bird-book publishing. It also has one of Audubon’s most glorious images, the ruby-coloured Greater Flamingo, as its cover. The order of the 435 hand-coloured engraved plates for Birds of America makes no ornithological sense until you know that subscribers received them in successive sets of five. Audubon always began each new addition to the sequence with ‘a wow factor image’. Cook’s selection is full of ‘wows’, especially the 30 pages devoted to Audubon masterpieces. As she says, the marvel of Audubon is that his birds represent ‘all the romance and heroism of the New World’.
She always respects this difference between the artist and the scientific illustrator, someone who imbues the work with more than bare facts, even at the expense of accuracy. Matisse once corrected a lady who complained of a liberty he had taken with naturalism: ‘Madam, you are mistaken, this is not a woman, this is a picture’. The unsurpassed oriental bird painters, although subject to impersonal rules, arrive at a similarly artistic conclusion: ‘Painting is no equal to mountains and water for the wonder of scenery; but mountains and water are no equal to painting for the sheer marvels of brush and ink.’ The oriental artists are Audubon’s match in their different way, but Cook’s is essentially an English-based survey so they receive a token and inevitably inadequate chapter.
Cook inclines to fine art designed for books by specialist bird artists rather than paintings of birds by fine artists in general. This is dictated by her contention that ‘the history of bird art is inextricably bound up with the history of printing’, and her interest in the evolution of the bird book, from collectors’ limited editions to today’s mass produced guides. Two facts stand out: the enormous labours and pains artists and patrons suffered for art and science, often with penurious results; and the importance throughout of the British. A final chapter on Peter Scott and others sees the hunternaturalist replaced by the conservationist and, though Cooke dodges the issue, the picture by the photograph.
BB’s Birds is a collection of illustrations and writing by Denys Watkins-Pitchford (1905-1990), better known by his literary pseudonym ‘BB’. Cook does not include Watkins-Pitchford, who, although a peerless naturalist, was perhaps the last in the hunter-artist tradition. His descriptions in word or picture have a poetic edge all too often lost since western artists replaced the gun with binoculars. BB’s many fans will treasure this memorial anthology, illustrated with ‘the moonlit witchery’ of his black-and-white work.
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