2 THE? ACU DOs BO Ne 8 Uae 
and ornithologist. He had a sound training under the French master of 
the day, Louis David, who taught him how to breathe life into his work. 
His melodramatic compositions, the vivid colors of the birds, the beautiful 
floral backgrounds — most of them done by one of his apprentices, Joe 
Mason, but inspired by Audubon — all combine to make pictures that are 
strikingly ornamental. Nearly 100 years after his death, Audubon’s work 
is more widely appreciated than ever before, thanks very largely, perhaps, 
to the Macmillan Company’s beautiful Birds of America, published in 1937. 
This volume is illustrated from the original elephant folio with plates 
superbly executed by R. R. Donnelley’s master engravers. 
John Cassin, in 1853-55, published his ten-part “elephant” edition of 
the Illustrations of the Birds of California, Texas, Oregon, British and 
Russian America, illustrated by George W. White. This enormous work 
tried to cover the western species not touched on by Wilson or Audubon. 
Another obscure work, long out of print, deserves to be re-issued. It 
is the Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, with text by 
Howard Jones and illustrations by Mrs. N. E. Jones. Published in three 
volumes at Circleville, Ohio, from 1879 to 1886, it is a collection of hand- 
colored lithographs which have never been excelled for accuracy and 
beauty in the delineation of nests. 
A name equally as great as Audubon’s is Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Many 
consider him the greatest painter of birds that ever lived. Less decorative 
than the older artist, he surpasses Audubon in accuracy, and in the 
intangible expression of the personality of birds — a skill gained by pro- 
found and extensive knowledge. 
Fuertes was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1874. He graduated from 
Cornell University in 1897, and for the next thirty years his work was in 
constant demand. Practically every important bird book of the period was 
illustrated with his paintings. His plates for Eaton’s Birds of New York, 
and Forbush’s Birds of Massachusetts include practically every species of 
eastern North America. The finest things he ever did, the climax of his 
life’s work, were the drawings made on the Chicago Daily News Abyssinian 
Expedition of 1926-27, under the direction of the Chicago Natural History 
Museum. He had often expressed a desire to get away from mere portraits 
of birds, such as those he did on commission, and hoped he would some day 
have time to make paintings that were more pictorial. In the Abyssinian 
pictures he attained his ideal. How far he would have gone in that direc- 
tion no one can guess, for in 1927 he was killed in a grade-crossing accident. 
Fuertes was a tireless worker in the field and never lost an opportunity 
to add to his collection of birds or sketches. The Dictionary of American 
Biography says that “at the time of his death he left some 3,500 beautifully 
prepared bird skins and over a thousand field and studio sketches of more 
than 400 different kinds of birds. His greatest collection, however, was the 
series of mental images of each bird which seemed to be indelibly impressed 
upon his mind with all the accuracy of a photographic plate. When ex- 
amining a bird his concentration was supreme. He was oblivious to every- 
thing about him; and during these moments, apparently, details of pose 
and expression were so fixed in his mind that years later he could reproduce 
