Birds The Bird in Art
The Bird in Art
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Birds The Bird in Art
The Bird in Art by Molly Dorkin & Lara Pilkington
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There is an extensive and rich history of birds in art. Avian subjects appear with frequency in the art of the Ancient Egyptians who cultivated the Lower Nile valley from 5000 B.C. to 300 A.D. The sun god Horus, one of the most significant deities in the pantheistic Egyptian religion, was traditionally depicted in art as a man with the head of a falcon. Thoth, god of the moon, was represented as a man with the head of an ibis. An example of Greek attic pottery features the Harpies, mythological creatures with the bodies of women and the wings of birds. Among the early representations of birds were naturalistic as mythological and religious examples. The many well-preserved frescoes at Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., include trompe l’oeil gardens with detailed records of local bird life. There are fantastic examples of ornithological art to be found among the old masters in Western Europe; these include works by artists who specialised in bird and game subjects as well as unique or unusual examples by artists who typically worked in other genres. The German artist Albrecht Dürer’s 1512 study of The Wing of a Blue Roller (Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna) is on par with his better-known Hare as a virtuoso achievement in early naturalistic painting. Dürer has represented (apparently life-size) the left wing of a roller, a bird found in southern and central Europe. Bird wings also appear in engravings by Dürer of Nemesis (1502) and the Coat of Arms of Death (1503), and his fascination with the range of colour and the distinction between the longer, blue-green upper feathers and the shorter, downy brown ones is remarkable.
Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) The Wing of a Blue Roller The Bird in Art
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Melchior d’Hondecoeter (c.1636-1695) Peacocks, 1683
Hendrik de Fromantiou (1633/4-1694) Trompe l’oeil, with a partridge
Northern Europe also gave rise to a tradition of still life and game subjects, with a number of artists specialising in paintings of birds. Melchior d’Hondecoeter (c. 1636-1695) was a Dutch artist who painted almost exclusively bird subjects, often in either exotic or park-like landscape settings. The birds in his works range from mundane species, such as geese, ducks, pigeons and swans, to more exotic varieties, including peacocks, cranes and cockatoos. Hondecoeter’s cousin, Jan Weenix, also specialised in still lifes of bird and game subjects, as did Jan Fyt and Frans Snyders. The lesser-known Peeter Boel (1622-1674) was a pupil of Fyt’s and borrowed much from his manner, though his handling of paint is usually smoother and he typically favoured a more vibrant palette. Boel was at his best when painting birds, and moved to France to study the animals in the newly-established zoo of Louis XIV. Many of his sketches were later used as models by the Gobelin tapestry artisans. The Dutch painter Hendrik de Fromantiou (1633/4-1694) was known for his still lifes of dead game birds. A characteristic example is his Trompe l’oeil with a partridge hanging from a red ribbon, a fly and a snail on the wall behind (sold Christie’s New York, 6 April 2006, lot 51.) Game pieces by Fromantiou range in date from 1666 to 1679, and in this early example the crispness of the paint handling reflects the influence of the fijnschilder artist Willem van Aelst.
Willem van Aelst (1602-1657), Still life with birds
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Hieronymous Bosch (c. 1450-1516), The Owl’s Nest
Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1601-1678), The Birdtrap
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), Two studies of birds of paradise
Northern artists also included birds in symbolic or allegorical paintings. Of these, one of the most enduringly popular and iconic images from the early Netherlandish landscape painting tradition is The Birdtrap, known to exist in over 120 versions by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, other members of the Brueghel family and their followers. It is also one of the earliest representations of the pure landscape in Netherlandish art. The obliviousness of the birds to the looming menace of the trap mirrors the fragility of the ice on which the cheerful villagers skate, emphasising the precariousness of life. Hieronymous Bosch (c. 1450-1516) was a Dutch painter known for using fantastic imagery to illustrate themes of a moral or religious (and often didactic) nature. Owls and other bird-like creatures often appear as nightmarish demons tormenting patient saints. Bosch’s most famous work is The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych that includes menacing bird-headed creatures. Yet Bosch combined a vivid imagination with a grounding in naturalistic study, as can be seen in detailed life drawings such as the Owl’s Nest (c. 1505-16, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam). Even Rembrandt (1606-1669) made a sketch of birds (Two studies of birds of paradise, c. 1637, Louvre, Paris).
Peeter Boel (1622-1674) Two Herons
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In Italy, much of the bird imagery in the Renaissance was iconographic, with birds carrying both religious and mythological significance. In Annunciation or Assumption subjects, or representations of the Holy Trinity, a dove is symbolic of the Holy Ghost – as, for instance, in Verrocchio’s (1435-1488) Baptism of Christ (1472-5, Uffizi, Florence). The goldfinch, which features in works such as Raphael’s (1483-1520) Madonna del Cardellino, is symbolic of Christ’s sacrifice (c. 1505-6, Uffizi, Florence). Birds also feature in mythological painting, such as the story of Leda and the Swan, which offered artists the opportunity to paint an erotic subject within the framework of classical mythology. Correggio’s (1489-1534) sensual, large-scale version (c. 1531-2, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) situates the episode in a wooded grove filled with bathing nymphs and putti. There were
also instances of naturalistic bird imagery in Italian Renaissance art. Antonio di Puccio, called Pisanello (1395-1455) for his native town of Pisa, was one of the foremost painters of the early Quattrocento. He was admired for his magnificent frescoes and largescale landscapes based on studies from life, and he is considered by scholars to have bridged the gap between the courtly International Gothic manner and the early Renaissance. His Stork (1430s, Louvre, Paris) is a prime example of Pisanello’s naturalistic manner. Also active in Northern Italy was the Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1465-1525/6) whose Hunting on the Lagoon represents a scene of Venetian bird hunters chasing cormorants for their plumage (c. 1490-5, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles). Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) wrote a Codex on the flight of birds (1505, Biblioteca
Reale, Turin) in which he used the observed flight behaviour of birds to propose mechanisms for flying machines. It includes sketches of birds in flight as well as more scientific, écorché studies of birds’ wings.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Codex on the flight of birds
Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1465-1525/6), Hunting on the Lagoon
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Verrocchio (1435-1488), Baptism of Christ
Pisanello (1395-1455), Stork
dickinson Alexandre-Franรงois Desportes (1661-1743), Two Partridge
In France, Alexandre-François Desportes (1661-1743) was a dedicated student of nature, painting life studies in oil of plants and animals to collect and use as reference material for his larger studio compositions. These charming sketches are among his finest and most vivid works, despite never having been intended for exhibition during the artist’s lifetime, and examples include his Two Partridge and an astonishingly spontaneous Eagle in two postures. While Desportes often painted birds in living attitudes, his contemporary Jean-Baptiste Oudry (16861755), like Weenix, made a career from painting bird and game subjects as still lifes. The great still life painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) addressed a number of avian subjects, such as the elegant Still life with Partridge and pear (1748, Städel Museum, Frankfurt). In the following generation, Jean-Baptiste Greuze (17251805) was best known for his sentimental depictions of young girls either holding doves or mourning by an empty cage. Later in the 19th century, Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), whose painterly manner came to influence the Impressionist school, made a study of Four Vultures in watercolour. Meanwhile, in Spain, Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) was a Spanish Romantic printmaker and painter who worked at the court of Charles IV of Spain. His Still life of dead birds, painted at the same time as his Disasters of War series, is now in the Prado (1806).
Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), Still life of dead birds Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), Four Vultures Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), Still life with Partridge and pear
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John James Audubon (1785-1851), Blue Jay
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In English painting, some of the early avian specialists were foreign imports, such as the Hungarian artist Jakob Bogdani (16581724) who worked at the court of Queen Anne. Many of Bogdani’s finest works remain in British collections, such as the Birds in a Landscape (Royal Collection). Bogdani in turn influenced the succeeding generation of bird painters such as Marmaduke Craddock and Pieter Casteels. Other representations of birds in art can be found among sporting subjects. George Stubbs (1724-1806), best known for his representations of horses in racing or hunting pictures, also painted a remarkable portrait of A Greenland (Grey) Falcon (1780, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven). Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) used a bird as a symbol of the Enlightenment interest in scientific experimentation in his masterpiece An experiment on a bird in the Air Pump (1768, National Gallery, London.) In the 19th century, Britain’s greatest landscape painter JM.W. Turner (1775-1851) devoted considerable energy to ornithological study with the Farnley Book of Birds (1816, Leeds Museum and Art Gallery). This extensive album was inspired by a shooting excursion with Walter Farnley of Farnley Hall in west
Yorkshire. Like Dürer three centuries earlier, Turner addressed the colour and texture of the feathers with consummate skill and meticulous attention to detail. Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1802-1873) was an English society painter with a particular interest in sporting subjects. His Ptarmigan (c. 1833, Private Collection) is a virtuoso study in shades of white and grey, in which the injured birds are depicted with tremendous dignity. Archibald Thorburn (1860-1935) was a Victorian sporting artist and bird specialist who was largely self-taught. (Illustrate: Partridge and a bullfinch in the snow, sold Christie’s, London, 13 December 2012, lot 101). It is not a surprise to find lifelike studies of birds’ wings by the Pre-Raphaelite painters, who often depicted angels and other Medieval subjects. More unsual, however, is the charming bird sketched by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, And this to say goodbye, (1895, private collection). Another founding member of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood was Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896), a keen sportsman and the author of Christmas Eve (1887, sold Christie’s London, 13 December 2012, lot 23) for which he
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-1898), And this to say goodbye J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), Robin John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), Studies of dead birds George Stubbs (1724-1806), A Greenland (Grey) Falcon
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made a number of studies and sketches of Jackdaws (Royal Academy of Arts, London). There was a strong tradition of naturalism and scientific interest among American artists active in the 19th century. The painter Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), who was associated with the Hudson River school of landscape painters early in his career, travelled to Brazil between 1863-4 and painted an extensive series of small pictures of hummingbirds in lush tropical settings. These were originally intended for a never-realised publication, and constitute some of the artist’s best-loved paintings. John James Audubon (17851851) was a French-born ornithologist and painter whose magnum opus, The Birds of America (1827-1839), is considered one of the greatest ornithological works ever produced. Illustrated with detailed handcoloured engravings based on Audubon’s own original drawings and watercolours, The Birds of America set the world auction
record for any book when a copy from the collection of Frederick, 2nd Lord Hesketh was sold at Sotheby’s for £7,321,250 on December 6th, 2010. Of the 120 complete copies known to survive, only 13 remain in private hands. John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) is best known for his society portraits and atmospheric watercolour landscapes, but he turned his attention to an avian subject in his Studies of a Dead Bird (1878, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Sargent’s depiction of the bird, seen from two perspectives, is every bit as elegant as his paintings of human subjects. Winslow Homer (1836-1910) specialised in sporting subjects and was himself an avid hunter and fisher. His Right and Left (1909, National Gallery of Art, Washington) depicts a pair of Common Goldeneye ducks in the moment they are struck by the blast of a shotgun.
Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896), Jackdaw study Archibald Thorburn (1860-1935), Partridge and a bullfinch in the snow
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Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1802-1873), Ptarmigan
Winslow Homer (1836-1910), Right and Left
Claude Monet (1840-1926), The Pheasant
The tradition of birds in art has carried through to the present day, featuring in notable examples of modern and contemporary painting and sculpture. Many such paintings are by artists for whom birds were not a primary interest, and appear as unique or rare examples within their oeuvres. For instance, Claude Monet (1840-1926), the so-called Father of Impressionism, painted The Pheasant in 1869, an elegant and spare still life of a dead pheasant on a crisp white tablecloth (W141, Private Collection). And another relatively early painting, The Shoot (1876, W433, Musée de la Chasse, Paris) combines the plein-air landscape genre with a sporting subject. Monet’s fellow Impressionist landscape painter Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) turned his attention to a still life subject for his
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Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), Two Hanging pheasants
Heron with Outstretched wings (1867, Musée Fabre, Montpellier.) It was the result of a painting session in the company of Frederic Bazille and Auguste Renoir, and, like Monet, takes as its primary concerns the effects of light on different surface textures. Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) was another member of the group, and his painting of Two Hanging Pheasants (1882, Private Collection) is a deviation from his more typical subjects of landscape or floral still life, though the play of light is still of paramount interest. The same is true of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s (18411919) Three pheasants (c. 1880, Private Collection, Dauberville no. 57), a looselypainted oil sketch of two birds on a table, and a relatively unusual subject choice for an artist better known for his landscapes and voluptuous nudes.
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Alfred Sisley (1839-1899), Heron with Outstretched wings
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), Still life with game birds
Camille Pissarro painted the hens in the barnyard of his home in Pontoise. Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) is only known to have painted one study of birds, the Still life with Game birds (c. 1872-3, Fogg Museum, Harvard University). Vincent van Gogh’s (1853-1890) Wheatfield with Crows (1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) is one of the artist’s most recognisable images, but he also featured birds in many other paintings, such as The Green Parrot (1886, Private Collection) and sketches, such as the Four Swifts with Landscape sketches (1887, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), The Green Parrot Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Four Swifts (opposite) Monet (1840-1926), Autumn shoot
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Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Polynesia. The Sky
Georges Braque (1882-1963), The Birds
Birds continued to feature prominently in the work of the greatest artists of the modern and contemporary eras. The Fauvist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) often turned to bird imagery, particularly in his famous paper cut-outs, many of which depict birds soaring in the company of other floating shapes and symbols. If Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) Guernica was one of history’s most moving representations of the atrocities of war, the Dove he first drew in 1949 became equally iconic as a symbol of peace. It is stunning in its elegant graphic simplicity. Picasso revisited the theme on a number of subsequent occasions. Picasso also explored avian subjects in his sculpture. La Chouette is a portrait of Ubu, a small, injured owl that Picasso nursed back to health. The artist painted Ubu in a dozen canvases between 1946 and 1947, and subsequently took up the motif of the owl with great enthusiasm in his sculpted works in all media. Georges Braque (1882-1963), who developed the Cubist style alongside Picasso, also painted birds. The Dutch artist Kees Van Dongen (18771968) was a member of the Fauvist movement. His bright
and often deliberately discordant colours, sometimes jarring in his portraits, seem ideally suited to his Solitary Bird (1908, Private Collection). Marc Chagall (1887-1985), considered by many to be “the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century”, frequently used bird imagery in his dream-like Surrealist pictures, and drew much of his material from biblical narratives and episodes from Jewish folk culture. His near-contemporary and fellow Jewish painter Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) was primarily concerned with shape and colour, and his still lifes of birds and game draw on Rembrandt’s carcass paintings. A work such as The Pheasant is a characteristic example, and belongs to a larger series of similar works (c. 1926; Private Collection). The Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte (18981967) is known for witty and thought-provoking paintings that challenge the viewer to reconsider his perception of reality. Many include birds, such as Le Printemps, in which the silhouette of a bird hovers above a nest of eggs (sold Christie’s London, 4 February 2008, lot 160).
Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973), Dove
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Rene Magritte (1898-1967), Le Printemps
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Chaim Soutine (1893-1943), The Pheasant
Kees Van Dongen (1877-1968), Solitary Bird
Max Ernst
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Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) imagined a bird as a fossil in his Bird of 1928 (Private Collection) In sculpture, we have the iconic Bird in Space series by the Romanian-born artist Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957). Brancusi is admired for the clean, geometric lines of his abstract style. The first Bird in Space sculpture dates from the early 1920s, and Brancusi remained preoccupied by the theme over the course of the next twenty years, working in both marble (seven versions) and bronze (nine versions). By eliminating the physical attributes of wings and feathers, and reducing the head and beak to a slanted oval plane, Brancusi was able to capture “the essence of flight” and the elegant, upward thrust of the soaring bird.
Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), Bird in Space
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Salvador DalĂ (1904-1989), Bird
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Lucian Freud (1922-2011), Dead Heron
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Examples of contemporary bird art range from the detailed and naturalistic to the wholly abstract. The German-born British painter Lucian Freud said “I was always excited by birds. If you touch wild birds, it’s a marvelous feeling”. His enduring interest might be traced back to his early encounters with works by Dürer. Boy with a Pigeon (1944) is a fine example of Freud’s skill as a draughtsman, and addresses the relationship between the calm, formallydressed boy and the pigeon he clutches, its beady orange eye seemingly meeting the viewer’s own. Meanwhile, the Dead Bird (1943; sold Christie’s, London, 28 June 2011, lot 5) and Dead Heron (1945) look at the form of the bird as a still life, with an almost old-master-like quality in both the composition and the treatment of the ruffled plumage. Francis Bacon’s (1909-1992) Tryptich, 1976 set the world artist record at Sotheby’s in 2008 when it sold for an astonishing $86.3 million. The nightmarish image, with its violently-slashed brushwork, takes as its
The Bird in Art
central subject a headless body set upon by menacing black birds of prey. The work contains references to both the Prometheus narrative and to the three Furies in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. This was not Bacon’s only experiment in painting birds, and a far less sinister work is Two Owls, No. 2 (c. 1957-61, Tate, London).
Francis Bacon’s (1909-1992), Two Owls, No. 2
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Damian Hirst (b. 1965), The Incomplete Truth
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The notorious English contemporary artist Damian Hirst (b. 1965) turned to one of the most traditional symbols in art for his 2006 work The Incomplete Truth. The dove, seemingly hovering in mid-air, wings spread, immediately calls to mind Christian references to the Holy Spirit, but is equally valid for its secular associations, relating for instance to Picasso’s dove of peace. The title of the work refers to the notion that Truth cannot be found in absolutes but must be discovered in the space between different concepts and beliefs. Like Hirst, the American Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) used actual dead birds in his “combine” works. This technique that caused enormous uproar when his 1959 work Canyon was declared un-sellable on account of the stuffed bald eagle, an endangered species, affixed to the surface of the canvas. The work was ultimately donated to the MoMA by the heirs of New York art dealer Ileana Sonnabend. Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), Canyon
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Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), who presently holds the title for the most expensive work by a living artist (Abstraktes Bild, sold in October 2012 for £21 million) also took up the bird as a subject in two versions of the Adler of 1972 (catalogue raisonné 322-1 and 322-2). The composition is an example of Richter’s monochrome photorealist style, which is based on the effect of blurred photo snapshots. Birds were a favourite subject during the Pop art movement, perhaps because their vivid colouring was well suited to the genre. Andy Warhol (1928-1987) produced a screenprint series of Endangered Species (1983) which included a Bald Eagle against a bright blue ground. Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) exhibited Baltimore oriole securing freshwater fish at his first exhibition of bird paintings held at the Ferus Gallery in 1965 (Sotheby’s, New York, 14 May 2013, lot 31). This series marked a turning point in Ruscha’s career, representing the earliest pictures in which he replaced painted words with images. Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920), who is also associated with the Pop art movement, takes his subjects from items of mass culture. His 1979 etching Bird represents a more unusual subject choice using his preferred vivid palette. Birds make rare appearances in the graffiti-inspired art of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) Untitled (Bird), 1981, Private Collection); the so-called “rephotographs” of Richard Prince (b. 1949; Bird with Helmet, 1971, Private Collection); and the kitsch sculpture of Jeff Koons (b. 1955; Wall relief with bird, 1991, Sotheby’s, New York, 14 May 2013, lot 38). Tracey Emin (b. 1963) may be best known for sensationalist pieces like Everyone I have ever slept with (1963-1995) and My bed, but she also made a number of much gentler works including a number of lithograph images of birds.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), Untitled (Bird)
Tracey Emin (b. 1963), Bird
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Gerhard Richter, Adler (Eagle), 1972
Ed Ruscha (b. 1937), Baltimore oriole securing freshwater fish
Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Endangered Species
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Richard Prince (b. 1949), Bird with Helmet
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Jeff Koons (b. 1955), Wall relief with bird
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Design: Lara Pilkington Research: Molly Dorkin Confidential: Š Simon C. Dickinson Ltd. 2013 This brochure is the property of Dickinson, and is being provided on the basis that it, and all the information therein, is maintained in strict confidence, and is not disclosed to any third party.
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