Page i 



CHICAGO NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM BULLETIN 



May- June, 191,5 



ORNITHOLOGICAL ILLUSTRATION FROM 1555 TO THE PRESENT 



(A Special Exhibit Commemorating the 160th Anniversary 

 of the Birth of John James Audubon, April 26, 1785) 



By ELLEN T. SMITH 



ASSOCIATE, DIVISION Of BIRDS 



John James Audubon was born 160 years 

 ago, on April 26, 1785. 



For the dual purpose of celebrating this 

 anniversary, and of marking the annual 

 spring return of migratory birds to the 

 Chicago area, the Museum's Division of 

 Birds has installed a special exhibit {which 



MALACHITE KINGFISHER, ETHIOPIA 



Painted by the late Louis Agassiz Fuertes on the Museum's Ethiopian Expedition 

 sponsored by the Chicago Daily News in 1926'27. In the current exhibit of bird prints. 



will continue until June U) of rare and 

 valuable books showing many of the most 

 striking examples of illustrations, mostly 

 in colors, made through several centuries. 



Everyone knows of, and loves Audubon, 

 and with reason. In the first place, he was a 

 romantic character, pioneering in the wilds 

 of middle western America with his charm- 

 ing wife Lucy, painting indefatigably the 

 birds of America, as he saw them and studied 

 them. In the second place, his sense of color 

 and design combined with his accuracy of 

 observation made his pictures decorative 

 and beautiful from an artistic point of view, 

 as well as from that of a scientific contri- 

 bution. Further, Audubon was extremely 

 particular about the reproduction of his 

 paintings. He had them engraved on copper 

 plates and colored by hand, at a time when 

 lithography and color printing were well 

 developed. Though the work was enthusi- 

 astically started by Lizars in Edinburgh, 

 one of the finest engravers of the day, 

 Audubon was not satisfied, and after only 

 the first ten plates had been completed he 

 took the rest to the Havells in London. 



How did Audubon happen to develop his 

 special art? Who and what went before 

 him to pave the way, and who came after 

 him? The answers to these questions are to 



be found in books — big books, little books, 

 elephant folios, strangely shaped volumes — 

 representing man's interest in the birds that 

 he sees around him and in the strange 

 creatures of foreign lands; books written 

 and illustrated by men with an insatiable 

 curiosity, and a desire to impart their 

 knowledge to others. 



In the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, 

 groups of these men 

 were filled with the urge 

 to combine in one work 

 all the scientific knowl- 

 edge of the world. They 

 are called "the encyclo- 

 paedists," and they 

 flourished in an age of 

 territorial expansion, 

 when new lands were 

 being discovered, with 

 brilliant and exciting 

 heretofore unknown 

 flora and fauna. The 

 new printing presses 

 were put to use describ- 

 ing these strange coun- 

 tries and printing the 

 learned works of the 

 encyclopaedists, which 

 for the most part were 

 illustrated by woodcuts. 

 Captains and travel- 

 ers wrote of their voy- 

 ages, illustrating their 

 letters with pen sketches. Penguins looked 

 like geese to them, so for many years a pen- 

 guin was known and pictured as "Magellan's 

 Goose." 



Some of the most amusing drawings are 

 the contemporary sketches of the Dodo, 

 and though the portraits vary somewhat, 

 they all have one thing in common — the 

 stupid expression on the face of the poor 

 bird which has been extinct for nearly 300 

 years. In 1906, Walter Rothschild published 

 a book on extinct birds, and included a col- 

 lection of all the contemporary tales and 

 sketches of the Dodo. 



The art of bird illustration obviously 

 follows the study of natural history in 

 general and ornithology in particular. It 

 is also dependent on the technique developed 

 to reproduce the artist's original painting. 

 Woodcuts, although skillfully handled by 

 such men as Bewick {British Birds, 1797) 

 and Jacques {Birds Across the Sky, 1942) 

 were not generally well adapted to bird 

 portrayal. 



By 1700, engraving from copper plates 

 had come into widespread use; and thus 

 we have Mark Catesby's Natural History 

 of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahamas, two 

 beautiful volumes full of hand colored 

 engravings, each one seemingly lovelier than 



the last, which in coloring and design were 

 remarkable forerunners of Audubon, though 

 published 100 years earlier, in 1731. 



Buffon's encyclopedic work on natural 

 history, profusely illustrated with hand 

 colored engravings, and the beautiful color 

 printing developed in France in the 18th 

 century, combined to stimulate bird art 

 in that country to a point at which it 

 became a definite center of ornithological 

 illustration from about 1770 to 1830. 



Meanwhile, in England four notable 

 characters — John Ray, Gilbert White, John 

 Selby, and Thomas Bewick — had aroused 

 enormous interest in ornithology, and the 

 early 19th Century saw Great Britain as a 

 center of publication of bird books and bird 

 illustrations. 



This era was dawning when Audubon 

 arrived from America with 435 of the most 

 beautiful bird illustrations the world had 

 ever seen. Each bird was pictured with 

 natural environmental plant material, occu- 

 pied in some characteristic action, on ele- 

 phant folio paper, and the size adds greatly 

 to the decorative value of the prints. 

 Audubon's work attained immense popu- 

 larity, and has been the inspiration of all 

 who came after him. 



The 19th Century was the Golden Age of 

 bird illustration, nearly all of the books 

 being folio or elephant folio size, and by 

 1890 the craze for depicting all the known 

 species of birds had nearly accomplished 

 that unbelievable feat. Two men are chiefly 

 responsible for this, in widely different ways. 



In 1796, Alois Senefelder was an obscure 

 Bavarian actor and playwright. Ten years 

 later his name was on the tongue of every 

 printer and artist in Europe and America. 

 Attempting to be his own printer and pub- 

 lisher, Senefelder experimented with plates, 

 acids and inks, in an endeavor to save 

 money. One day his mother asked him to 

 write her laundry list. Alois picked up the 

 nearest thing at hand — a smooth stone, and 

 wrote the list with his greasy ink. A few 

 hours later, curiosity led him to etch the 

 stone and pull a proof, thereby discovering 

 relief engraving on stone. 



After two years of further experiments, he 

 found he could get a print from the surface 

 of the stone without etching, and so in 1798 

 lithography was born. Its advantages over 

 previous methods of reproducing the original 

 work of an artist, both in accuracy and in 

 time saved, were so apparent that by 1806, 

 with a few improvements, it had become an 

 art and was universally adopted. 



Lithography was made use of by the man 

 who is easily the most prolific bird artist the 

 world has yet known, John Gould. Gould's 

 first work Birds of the Himalaya Mountains, 

 was published in 1832, and his last, the 

 supplement to the Humming Birds in 1882, 

 a year after his death. In these fifty years, 

 Gould was the author of ten major works on 

 birds, the forty-two volumes containing 

 3,012 illustrations, all lithographs, which 



