Louis Agassiz Fuertes— Painter of Bird Portraits 279 



artists who paint bird portraits based on an intimate, sympathetic, loving 

 study of their subject in nature, and who have the ability to express what they 

 see and feel, can be counted on one's fingers, and the name of Louis Agassiz 

 Fuertes would be included before the second hand was reached. 



Fuertes, in possession of a freshly captured specimen of some bird which was 

 before unknown to him, is, for the time, wholly beyond the reach of all sensa- 

 tions other than those occasioned by the specimen before him. His con- 

 centration annihilates his surroundings. Color, pattern, form, contour, minute 

 details of structure, all are absorbed and assimilated so completely that they 

 become part of himself, and they can be reproduced at any future time with 

 amazing accuracy. Less consciously, but no less thoroughly and effectively, 

 does he store impressions of the bird's appearance in life, its pose, mannerisms, 

 characteristic gestures of wings, tail or crest, its facial expression — all are 

 recorded with surprising fidelity. 



This indeed is the keynote of Fuertes' genius — for genius it is. His mind 

 appears to be a delicately sensitized plate designed especially to catch and fix 

 images of bird life; and of such images he has filed, and has at his finger tips 

 for use, a countless number; for his opportunities for field study have been 

 greater than those of any other painter of birds. It has been my good fortune 

 to be with Fuertes on many occasions when for the first time we met with some 

 particularly interesting bird in nature. At such times there was perhaps no 

 very marked difference in the extent of our enthusiasm or the manner in which 

 it was expressed; but all the time, subconsciously, Fuertes' mental photo- 

 graphic process were making record after record. At the moment not a line 

 would be drawn or a note written, but so indeUbly and distinctly was what he 

 had seen etched on his memory that it could later be visualized as clearly and 

 faithfully as though the original were before him. 



Fuertes' bird portraits, like those of a great portrait painter of men, depict 

 not only those externals which can be seen by any observant person, but they 

 reveal character. His pictures are instinct with life, and differ from the work 

 of the inexperienced or unsympathic artist as a living bird differs from a stuffed 

 one. 



Fuertes was born at Ithaca, where he now lives, in 1874. In 1897 he was 

 graduated from Cornell, of which his father was director of the College of Civil 

 Engineering. Drawing birds was with him as natural an outward evidence of 

 an inward condition as with most children spinning tops is an expression of 

 an inherent love of play. Before his graduation, he had made the illustrations 

 for Florence Merriam Bailey's Birding on a Bronco, and Mabel Osgood Wright's 

 and Elliot Coues' Citizen Bird. 



It was the encouragement he received from Coues that led him definitely to 

 decide to become a painter of birds, and the immediate recognition his work 

 received permitted him to give rein to the naturalist's longing to see the birds 

 of other lands. 



