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Catalogue Essay

Birds for Art's Sake

The White Feather
Geraldine Rede (18741943)
The White Feather c.1900 [Portrait of Miles Freanklin]
National Library of Australia R681

From early on, expressive art recorded elements of the same story of exploitation. The centred lyrebird fan of Nicholas Chevalier's entrancing watercolour Fancy Costume Emblematic of Australia (c.1860) pointed the sorry way to Australian involvement in the devastating worldwide plumage industry which lasted into the 1920s. The arts of taxidermy were now drawn boldly into the adornment and decorative crafts, as Eliza Catherine Wintle's splendid Kookaburra Hand-Screen (c.1892) shows. Dazzling Australian birds like the white egret and heron were transformed to spectacular feather-work, and brought close to extinction.

Expressive bird art, unconcerned with identification, addresses the emotional and symbolic value of birds. Over a century before Australian colonial work, Simon Verelst's portrait Lady Anne Russell (c.1670s) used an imported cockatoo in a flashy imperial variation on the use of birds in European child portraiture. The cryptic Boy with a Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (c.1815?), attributed to John William Lewin, presents its bird and child as wistful images in a colonial setting. These cockatoos, accurate enough to the eye, exist to express human values and emotions.

 

John Heaviside Clark (c.1770 - 1863) engraver after John William Lewin (1770 - 1819), Throwing the Spear

John Heaviside Clark (c.17701863) engraver
after John William Lewin (1770
1819)
Throwing the Spear
National Library of Australia F577

Colonial works also soon appeared which remind us of more practical reasons for bird killing than studying natural history. John Heaviside Clark's Throwing the Spear (1813), S.T.Gill's Sportsmen with Game by Coast (c.1856) and the chromolithograph Animals of Australia ...(1880s?) all feature bird hunting, and all incorporate imported arts and styles which change, as they record, an invaded world.

Only at the close of the nineteenth century, however, do birds seem generally to fly free from the cage of specimens. Margaret Fleming's The Cockatoo (1895), though boldly centring a dead bird, wholly transcends any reference to natural history. Beautiful even in death, Fleming's cockatoo appears as a lost companion whose limp death-fall is light years away from the attitudes of gun-happy naturalists. If exploited, this cockatoo is exploited by art.


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