Catalogue
Essay
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Victorian
cabinet of stuffed Australian fauna
By Henry E. Ward
Courtesy of J.B. Hawkins Antiques
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Brilliant
Curiosities
Art
enlivens dead things. Many of the images of colonial bird
art were drawn (as many still are) from skins, often by
Londoners in London. The skins hold form, colour and texture
motionless for copying, but, remote from their bushland,
produce sketches which seem naive and awkward. Often it
is the radiant hand-colouring that makes these birds live.
The
exhibition's early documentary drawings begin with the jewel-like
paintings of the Hunter sketchbook, and with watercolours
from the Sarah Stone album. They continue with work by James
Sowerby, John William Lewin, Ferdinand Bauer and Charles
Lesueur, displayed in the form of original paintings, hand-coloured
engravings in rare books, and, in the case of Ferdinand
Bauer, in the form of recent hand-printed lithographs. They
culminate in examples of the famous lithographic work of
Elizabeth Gould.
John
Gould produced his remarkable volumes of Birds of Australia
(18411848) from his publishing house in Golden
Square, London. He used the lithographic work of his wife,
Elizabeth Gould, and, after her sudden death in 1841, that
of Henry Constantine Richter, William Hart and others. With
John Lewin's Birds of New Holland...(1808) and Birds
of New South Wales (1813) their only predecessors, these
great books inaugurated a remarkable tradition of fine Australian
bird book-making. The exhibition complements books by John
Gould and Gregory Macalister Mathews with original sketches
and watercolours, and with fascinating related documents
from the Library's Manuscript Collection. Also featured
is a rare Victorian cabinet of stuffed Australian fauna
which was made by Henry E. Ward, the famous London taxidermist
and friend of John Gould. Almost certainly exhibited at
the London International Exhibition of 1862, this large
cabinet filled with hundreds of specimens illustrates the
grandeur and ambition of high Victorian versions of eighteenth-century
'cabinets of curiosities'.
This
scientific strand in Australian bird portraiture is seen
throughout the exhibition in bird paintings by Louisa Atkinson,
Neville William Cayley, Ebenezer E. Gostelow, Betty Temple
Watts and Lilian Medland; then in spectacular paintings
by William T. Cooper and in a selection of the work of photographers
for the National Photographic Index of Australian Birds.
The late twentieth-century paintings in books by Frank Thomson
Morris register both the continuing life of traditional
bird art and the life of birds in the natural world, though
Morris's work is represented by one pencil drawing onlyin
his book Pencil Drawings 196978.
Across
its 200 years, Australian naturalistic bird illustration
traces an evolution from awkwardly posed curiosities to
bright recognisable friends in home foliage and habitat.
The changing illustrative styles also mirror a history of
attitudes toward birds, from the time when fading, insect-infested
skins were more valuable than living birds, to our own time,
when protection attitudes still fail to stop the devastation
of habitats that threatens all Australian birds. The birds
our aggressive suburbs and industries drive away do not
fly elsewhere; they die.
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