The Art of the Bird: The History of Ornithological Art through Forty Artists by Roger J. Lederer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A mixed bag – closer to 2 stars for the text, but the wealth of color illustrations of some truly splendid paintings pulls it up a star.
The author, Roger Lederer, an ornithologist by training, has collected a rich array of bird illustrations and bird art, ranging from old woodcuts to modern paintings. I often deplore the lack of good images found in art books these days, but while occasionally uneven in quality, this is overall a very handsome book to page through. Lederer follows a roughly chronological order, placing the artists and their work in the context of the times and the intent of the work: documentary, scientific illustration, field guides, and purely aesthetic. Lederer seems to have selected primarily works in which you would be able to identify the species, depicted realistically (if not always entirely accurately), so folk art or more “symbolic” images are not here, and all the artists are European or American (there are a couple of women). You will have to get past several quite horrible tables full of dead, gutted animals and a nasty hunting scene by Rubens (I never did like Rubens…). But Fabritius’s transcendent goldfinch gets a whole page to himself, there are some farmyards of histrionic poultry, and LOTS of parrots and peacocks, by artists famous (Audubon) and unfamous. My favorite part was discovering that the English poet Edward Lear (“There once was a man with a beard…” and The Owl and the Pussycat) was an absolutely brilliant painter of birds as a young man. His red and yellow macaw on p. 105 is nothing short of spectacular; his snowy owls are dramatically better than Audubon’s. (I’m ordering a reproduction of his barn owl portrait for my own wall… wish I could afford even a plate from the original book it appeared in!) The book closes with a tribute to David Sibley, the current star of bird field guide illustrations – what a pleasure to see his paintings closer to their actual size as painted, and appreciate the delicate and sure-handed subtleties we can’t see in the books we carry in our backpacks.
The editing of the text is odd, and I would have expected better from the U of Chicago Press. Passages of description are repeated verbatim in both illustration captions and the text. There are descriptions in the text of paintings not illustrated, and illustrations that are not discussed in the text. One discussion of a Malcom Cradock painting refers explicitly to birds that don’t appear in the illustration… is the image a detail? I am still puzzling over the charming little painting of a blue-faced malkoha: Lederer remarks we can see it must have been a captive bird because of the damage to the tail feathers. At first glance, yes, the edges of the feathers look tattered, but a closer look shows the artist has sketched the fine edges that actually show that the feathers are edged in white – not damage, just white patches, but hard to see against the white background of the image. Did he really just miss that? As I Googled up some more information about various artists and birds, I also discovered passages that suggest Lederer did much the same in compiling his text – and the bibliography includes a fair number of citations to Wikipedia.
This is an attractive, enjoyable collection of lovely pictures and some interesting stories about birds and bird artists in Europe and American in the last four centuries or so. The blend of ornithological and art historical scholarship is not so successful.
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