240



Mr. Frank M. Chapman,



Artists who introduce into their canvases birds as impossibly

feathered as conventional angels, artists who paint birds with more

or less accuracy of color and form and, more rarely, pose, have not

been few in number ; but the 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 Fourtes

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 sensations other than those occasioned by

the specimen before him. His concentration annihilates his sur¬

roundings. 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 enthu¬

siasm or the manner in which it was expressed : but all the time,

subconsciously, Fuertes’ mental photographic processes were making

record after record. At the moment not a line would be drawn or

a note written, but so indelibly and distinctly was what he had seen

etched on his memory that it could later be visualised 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 in-



