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Birds

Flights of fancy

Katrina Cook
Quercus, 224pp, £25,

John McEwen

Wednesday, 5th March 2008

John McEwan on two ornithological books

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, albeit half the size of Audubon’s double- elephant-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’.

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Katrina Cook

April 14th, 2008 10:27am

I'm flattered that John McEwan has taken the time to read so much of my text, but feel I must add a few comments and corrections. Firstly, my passage about the Dodo is referring to the fabled WHITE Dodo of Reunion and not the Dodo of Mauritius of which there is ample fossil evidence. Audubon shares chapter 5 with other artists working on American birds, Alexander Wilson, Mark Catesby and John White. The Easter chapter is indeed shorter than I would have liked, but by comparison, most general books on bird art do not cover eastern art at all. The eastern stuff was difficult to research within the given time (4 months from start to finish)and difficult to source the images. I would certainly oppose the statement that my book is biased towards English work: with one Chapter each devoted to America, the Far East and Rennaissance Europe I do not really think this can be the case? Finally, yes I would have loved to have included some avant garde works including Picasso, Magritte and Max Ernst, but struggled to fit these within the constraints of the 7 themed chapters. Perhaps birds in fine art could be the subject of another book? If so, I'd be first in the queue to write it.

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