LOUIS AGASSIZ FUERTES — PAINTER OF BIRD 
PORTRAITS 
By Frank M. Chapman 
OVE of birds as “the most eloquent 
expression of nature’s beauty, Joy 
and freedom”’ is the rightful heri- 
tage of everyone who in one way or 
another hears the call of the outdoor 
world. But that inexplicable fascination 
for birds which awakens an instinctive 
uncontrollable response to the sight of 
their forms or the sound of their voices, 
which arouses a passionate desire to 
become familiar their 
haunts and obtain an intimate insight 
with them in 
into their ways, and which overcomes 
every obstacle until, at least in a meas- 
ure, this desire is gratified, is the gift of 
the gods which marks the true orni- 
thologist. 
always developed, love of birds is sup- 
In him the universal, if not 
plemented by the naturalist’s longing 
to discover the seerets of nature. Your 
true bird student, therefore, is a curious, 
and sometimes contradictory combina- 
tion of poet and scientist. 
Men in whom this taste and ambition 
combine to make birds the most signifi- 
cant forms of the animal world, are not 
numerous; but a great painter of birds 
must be primarily a man of this type. 
When therefore one considers how small 
is the chance that the essential attributes 
which make on the one hand an orni- 
thologist, on the other an artist, will be 
found in one individual, it is small won- 
der that the world has known so few 
real bird portrait painters. 
Artists who introduce into their can- 
vases 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 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 
sensations other than those occasioned 
His con- 
centration annihilates his surroundings. 
by the specimen before him. 
Color, pattern, form, contour, minute 
details of structure, all are absorbed and 
assimilated so completely that they be- 
come 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 re- 
corded 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 oppor- 
tunities 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; 
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