The Parrot in Art? Unraise your eyebrows: parrots have featured in Western European art for 500 years, depicted by Dürer, van Eyck and Mantegna; Rubens and Rembrandt; Tiepolo, Reynolds and Goya; Delacroix and Courbet; Matisse and Frieda Kahlo. It is hardly surprising. Ever since they were imported into Europe from India in the 4th century BC, parrots have been a source of marvel: their exotic plumage, their near-human mimetic voice, squawking, talking. They have intrigued Aristotle and Pliny, Aesop and Ovid.
Now Richard Verdi, the director of the Barber and for many years a lover of parrots, has given them their first exhibition that charts the ways in which artists have seen them: as symbols of the Fall in the Garden of Eden and of the Virgin Birth of Christ, as decoration, as surrogate humans, as symbols of luxury and sexual abandon.
In ‘The Fall of Man’, Dürer contrasts the wise parrot, held aloft by Adam, with the serpent tempting Eve. Martin Schongauer, in a poised and delicate engraving, has the Virgin turning the pages of a breviary with her right hand while a parakeet perches on the left hand of the Christ Child. Large and sumptuous still-lifes by Jan Fyt and Jacob Fransz van der Merck show how 17th-century Dutch artists recognised the decorative potential of parrots’ glorious plumage and exotic colours to animate otherwise still-lifes.
By the 18th century, parrots had progressed from being objects to being subjects. In Reynolds’s portrait of Lady Cockburn and her three eldest sons, a large scarlet macaw balances, and comments on, the composition by haughtily turning away as the children clamber over their mother, while another shares the billing in Tiepolo’s ‘A Young Woman with a Macaw’. The bird’s beak, claws and fierce eye trained on the viewer contrast with the woman’s bared breast and milky skin.
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