476 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1955 



unusual fowl, Savery's renditions of it come close to being the main 

 source of our concept of its appearance in life. 



Among the items assembled at Ghent was a drawing belonging to 

 the E. B. Crocker Art Gallery, at Sacramento, Calif. (PI. 1.) This 

 drawing, in black crayon, 140 x 210 mm., signed in gauche at the bot- 

 tom: "Savery," is listed as "Deux . . . Dodo . . .," number 107 (p. 36) 

 in the excellent catalog issued for the exhibition under the supervision 

 of Paul Eeckhaut. In the discussion of a painting, "Landscape with 

 Birds," signed and dated 1628, loaned by the Kunsthistorisches Mu- 

 seum, Vienna, number 75 of the Ghent exhibition, the dodo in it 

 (pi. 3, fig. 2) is singled out for brief comment, with a reference to 

 the Crocker Gallery's drawing, ". . . qui prouve que Savery a du 

 executer son tableau d'apres un specimen vivant . . . ." 



The Crocker Gallery drawing had remained unstudied and even 

 unrecorded for many years. It was one of a number of old master 

 drawings, formerly in the possession of Rudolf Weigel, of Leipzig, 

 Germany, purchased in Europe by Judge and Mrs. Crocker in the 

 early 1870's. According to the 1954 Ghent catalog it had at one time 

 been number 448 of the "Ancienne Collection Rosey," a collection 

 concerning which I have been unable to learn anything further. 



For the next 80 years it remained, virtually unnoticed, in the 

 Crocker files, labeled simply "Exotic Birds," under which title it was 

 once included in a temporary exhibition in the late 1930's. Because 

 it was unpublished and unknown, it was not mentioned in Strickland 

 and Melville's monograph "The Dodo and Its Kindred" (1848) or in 

 Rothschild's "Extinct Birds" (1907), and not even in Hachisuka's re- 

 cent book "The Dodo and Kindred Birds" (1954) . 



It was first brought prominently into public notice in 1950 when 

 the great assemblage of art treasures from Vienna was touring the 

 United States. Among the paintings was the one by Savery men- 

 tioned earlier in this note. It came to the attention of John B. Mat- 

 thew, then director of the Crocker Gallery, who recalled the Savery 

 drawing in that museum and was stimulated to study it more care- 

 fully. He noticed that the drawing contained no less than three dodos 

 and that they were depicted with webbed feet, whereas the painting 

 included a single one, with no webs between the toes. 



Savery's Vienna painting had long been well known and was often 

 reproduced but was suspected more than once of not being wholly 

 accurate inasmuch as the artist had apparently given the dodo two 

 right feet. Because of this inaccuracy Matthews was inclined to sug- 

 gest that where the artist had gone astray in one particular he might 

 have done so in another, and that the error perpetrated therein was 

 even greater than previously supposed and the bird's feet should have 

 been shown with webs between the toes. Inasmuch as the drawing 



