Per pee Agu UB ON o*B'UCL Li barstN 7 
opportunity to study it. When Rex was ten years old his father died, 
leaving the family penniless, and the child immediately left school and went 
to work. When he was 15 he learned copper engraving at Tiffany’s, and 
soon afterward tried photo-engraving for newspapers. He began to write 
nature articles for the New York papers, illustrating them with sketches of 
birds he saw on his week-end rambles. He completed his first bird painting, 
a brown thrasher, when he was 20. It was then that he formed the modest 
ambition to paint all the birds of America. 
In the next 15 years he wandered all over the continent, sketching birds 
wherever he went, and working just enough to keep himself alive. He 
spent three years in the Gloucester fishing fleet, drawing sea birds in his 
spare time. He labored in the western wheat fields, and in road gangs. 
In New York he worked as a race-track bookmaker for ten dollars an 
afternoon, and there he had his first stroke of luck. He made a bet of his 
own on a long shot and won $2,000. That money permitted him to devote 
all his time for the next two years on birds. By 1900 he had finished 
almost 500 paintings. Then a book was published with the pictures of 
Fuertes. Brasher says, “I took a long, sober look at my own pictures, and 
the whole lot of them went into the furnace.” 
He started over again and labored another five years. But in 1905 he 
discovered a new technique of rendering the color of feathers, and again 
he started the fire with his paintings. A third time he was satisfied. By 
this time he was living in his present home, a farmhouse near Kent, Con- 
necticut. He labored 15 hours a day, and by 1928 had completed his work 
— 874 paintings showing in detail 1,201 species and subspecies, and 
incidentally, as backgrounds, all the American trees. Audubon and Fuertes 
made only half as many paintings, but Brasher hastens to explain that he 
was helped by the work of his predecessors, and moreover he had the use 
of the American Museum of Natural History’s collection of 100,000 skins. 
Now came the problem of publishing this stupendous work. When the 
publishers discovered that it would cost $500,000 to reproduce the paintings 
they understandably lost interest. Brasher determined to become his own 
publisher. He had the pictures reproduced in black and white, and then 
with a staff of artists to paint in the backgrounds, he hand-colored every 
print himself. In three and one-half years he worked on 85,000 prints, 
finally producing 100 sets of 12 volumes. 
Still his troubles weren’t over. He offered the original paintings to the 
State of Connecticut with the provision that they build a suitable museum 
to house them. For several years they remained stored away while nothing 
was done about the museum. Finally his friends persuaded him that he 
had made a mistake in giving them away. They urged him to take them 
back, and later offer them for sale. It was smart psychology and it worked. 
In June, 1941, the State Legislature passed on appropriation of $74,290 
to purchase a collection that had been in their hands for seven years as an 
unappreciated gift! Presumably they will build the museum in Kent Falls 
State Park after the war. 
Three Chicago artists should be known to Illinois bird lovers. Karl 
Plath, curator of birds at the Brookfield Zoo, was born in Chicago and 
