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| Catalogue
Essay
Birds for Art's Sake
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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.
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John
Heaviside Clark (c.17701863)
engraver
after John William Lewin (17701819)
Throwing the Spear
National Library of Australia F577
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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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©1999, National Library of Australia
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