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Catalogue Essay
Victorian cabinet of stuffed Australian fauna

Victorian cabinet of stuffed Australian fauna
By Henry E. Ward
Courtesy of J.B. Hawkins Antiques

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 only—in 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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A selection of images from BIRDS!
National Library of Australia.
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Copyright: ©1999, National Library of Australia