fae VODUBON BULLETIN 
Published Quarterly by the 
ILLINOIS AUDUBON SOCIETY 
2001 NorTH CLARK STREET, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 
Number 55 September, 1945 
Bird Painting in America 
By JANET HULL ZIMMERMANN 
BIRD PAINTING is one of the most difficult and exacting of arts. No other 
demands that the painter be a scientist as well as an artist. Only an 
ornithologist is capable of producing work that is structurally correct. 
Only a devoted student with years of observation in the field can capture 
in a single figure the composite of impressions that is the very essence of 
the bird. Add to the scientist’s knowledge the artist’s skill in giving his 
figures third-dimensional movement, in conveying the very smell and feel 
of the marsh, the sea, and the woods, and you have the perfect bird painter. 
Bird painting in America begins with Mark Catesby, an English 
- naturalist and traveler who came to Virginia in 1712. In his wanderings up 
and down the coast and off to the Bahamas he gathered the material for 
his life work, the Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahamas. 
The state of ornithology in his day may be appreciated from the fact that 
his studies of Carolina birds led him to refute the accepted theory that birds 
spend the winter hibernating in the mud and ooze of lake bottoms! The 
first of his two volumes appeared in 1731. The work was illustrated with 
more than 200 engravings from copper plates, etched by Catesby himself 
from his own paintings, and hand-tinted under his personal direction. Al- 
though his drawings were crude, lifeless, without a semblance of anatomical 
accuracy, they have, nevertheless considerable charm. The library of the 
Chicago Natural History Museum owns the books. And the interested 
student may find a few reproductions in black and white in the magazine 
Antiques, volume 37, page 282. 
Alexander Wilson, more than 75 years later, produced his great Amevi- 
can Ornithology. Wilson contributed more to the science of ornithology 
than he did to painting. Failing to master the art of etching which Catesby 
had employed, he engaged a fellow Scotsman, Alexander Lawson, to pre- 
pare the plates from his drawings. These drawings were done in pencil or 
in ink, sometimes only in outline. Wilson supplemented them with verbal 
descriptions, hanging impatiently over Lawson’s shoulder as he worked. 
The sample proof was colored by Wilson as a model for the colorists of the 
other copies. Certainly to Lawson almost as much as to Wilson is due the 
success of the undertaking. The work stimulated others to the study of 
North American birdlife, and started the vogue on which Audubon rode 
to fame. 
John James Audubon was the first to combine the gifts of both artist 
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