Birds of the Enlightenment

Opening Reception, Saturday, June 5, 2010, 4:30 – 6:30 P.M.
The New Bedford Art Museum is located at 608 Pleasant Street, New Bedford, MA
Summer Hours Tuesday – Sunday 10:00 A.M. – 5:00 P.M.

For Additional Information, Please Contact Peggi Medeiros, pmedeiros@ComCast.net, (508) 992-9624

Birds of the Enlightenment
Predecessors and Contemporaries of J. J. Audubon
Tom Puryear, Curator

Opening Reception, Saturday, June 5, 2010
4:30 – 6:30 P.M.

The New Bedford Art Museum is pleased to announce the opening of Birds of the Enlightenment: Predecessors and Contemporaries of J.J. Audubon curated by Tom Puryear on Saturday, June 5, 2010 from 4:30 – 6:30 P.M. Birds of the Enlightenment is a compliment to Taking Flight: The Birds of John James Audubon from the Collection of the New Bedford Free Public Library. It opens concurrently with Vault Series: Portraits curated by Joan Backes. All three exhibitions run through September 11, 2010.

Everyone knows or assumes they know John James Audubon and his work. It is easy to be sure that he was the first artist to study birds and turn them into high art. Not true and Birds of the Enlightenment: Predecessors and Contemporaries of J.J. Audubon proves the point brilliantly.

New Bedford Art Museum Guest Curator, Tom Puryear, has assembled a collection of over 75 wood cuts, hand-colored engravings and lithographs from both sides of the Atlantic to bring guests of the New Bedford Art Museum a broad sampling of the publications that preceded and then competed for attention with Audubon’s majestic images.

This exhibition includes original bird illustrations from some eighty different publications that involved more than twice that many artists, editors, engravers, writers, printers, and illustrators who gave direction to this endeavor.

Mr. Puryear notes in his Curator’s statement, “[Audubon] was, however, by no means the first to produce crisp and accurate images of birds for sale to an increasingly curious public. He was also, in many ways, the culmination of a trend begun in the late Italian Renaissance, around 1560, to accurately document and classify the apparent chaos of life that surrounds mankind in the natural world. Dozens of publications intent upon organizing and describing the natural world appeared from the middle of the 16th century to the end of the 18th. These are the early years of scientific inquiry. We call this period The Enlightenment.”

The public is cordially invited to celebrate the opening of Birds of the Enlightenment: Predecessors and Contemporaries of J.J. Audubon

Saturday, June 5th from 4:30 – 6:30 P.M. There is no charge for the opening reception.

The New Bedford Art Museum is grateful for the continuing support of the MA Cultural Council and the City of New Bedford.

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Curator’s Statement

The birds of Europe, both migratory and resident, had been given a degree of attention since Pliny the Elder wrote his Naturae Historia in the 1st century BC. The first natural history pioneers found a starting point in Pliny and added to his efforts with gusto, if not scientific thoroughness. The exotic foreign lands that opened to European exploration in this period provided fertile ground as well.

The voyages of discovery and conquest in the 17th century gave way to voyages of trade and diplomacy in the 18th and 19th centuries

On each of these, it seems, there was always someone on board interested enough in natural history (or paid enough) to seek out new species of animals and to collect specimens that would be brought home to eager colleagues ready to carefully delineate these specimens and publish them for presentation to the European and American public.

Natural history became a lifelong pursuit of the men and women who were beginning to create the burgeoning fields of Science. Some were scientists by training or inclination (that is, professors, physicians, pharmacists, stock breeders, experimental farmers), but many gravitated to science from the law, the clergy, elementary or secondary education, or simply from the printing business.

The artists they employed may not be familiar to those coming fresh to this experience, but many of them are well known to collectors in the field. Many, however, remain anonymous. Sometimes the engraver is better known than the original draftsman, but sometimes they are the same person.

In all cases, the publisher or author (again, sometimes the same person) is by far the more famous. Names such as Ulysse Aldrovandi, Count de Buffon, Baron Cuvier, Charles Lucien Bonaparte, and, on the English side, Sir William Jardine, Cavendish Pelham, Oliver Goldsmith, , and Reverend Francis Orpen Morris are represented in the collection, as well as artists like Titian Peale, Edouard Traviès. Prideaux John Selby, Joseph Wolfe, Eliphalet Brown, Jr, Francois Nicolas Martinet, Mattheus Merian, Thomas Doughty, George Edwards, and Jemima Blackburn, to name only a few.

The images to be shown begin in the earliest years, around 1560 to 1600, but most are from 1730 to around 1870 (the outbreak of the Civil War in America put a damper on luxury printing for a while) and represent the wide variety of publications produced in Western Europe and America during this most exciting era of discovery and dissemination.

Each of these prints is original to its period; there are no reproductions. Each is hand drawn, engraved or lithographed, hand-colored, and often hand-bound into the books from which they have now been separated. Each publication has a story to tell about the thought processes of those on the introductory edge of modern science and the bright and sometimes sassy engravings that accompanied the text have a lot to tell us about the juncture between art and the real world.

Some of these publications were strictly created for a sophisticated professional audience whose scientific standards demanded exacting images as well as a thorough and accurate text. The demand for accuracy led to a rather straight forward, factual, and descriptive depiction. This so-called “Georgian solution” resulted in images of stuffed and mounted birds usually carefully posed in profile, perched on twigs or grassy hummocks, and carefully colored by hand to emphasize their unique features. Styles changed as artists sought to inject that difficult to define quality of “life” into the image. Spontaneity was a constant goal.

Other publications were directed to the general public and still others intended for educational purposes in booklets for school age children. They all frequently shared artists, engravers, drawings, and engravings, sometimes most haphazardly and often without giving credit to the originator. Their editors and publishers were sometimes related by blood or marriage, most were members of the same clubs and professional societies and all were quite international in their friendships, their research, and their scholarly references – and borrowings.

Whatever their motivation, the fascinating pages in this exhibition made their way into the public consciousness with every new and amazing discovery brought back by returning sailing ships.

This growing interest in the natural world may have seen its culmination in the magnificent prints created by Audubon, but long before him – and certainly by the time his Elephant folio Birds of America was complete -- dozens of ornithological publications were competing for the attention of the public. Few collectors could afford the luxury of Audubon’s large-scale images, however, and personal collections of smaller editions grew dramatically. Loose folios of prints from nature were often found on tables in the reception rooms of ordinary families, much to the delight of their guests.

Part of this self-conscious urge to become familiar with as many species as possible led to multi-volume Encyclopedias and Dictionaries. The French pioneer Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1768) was followed almost immediately by Baron Georges Cuvier and Charles d’Orbigney, not to mention Denis Diderot, the most ambitious of them all. The British Isles produced John Wilkes’ Encyclopaedia Londinensis (around 1810) and many other examples, such as William Mackenzie’s The National Encyclopedia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge (1868). These publications often included hand colored engravings of every crustacean, insect, bird, mammal, and reptile the authors could muster.

By the middle of the 19th century, more specialized publications began to appear that would focus only on the more popular species: hunting dogs, game birds, colorful parrots, precious hummingbirds, or the spectacular Bird of Paradise. Collectors avidly sought images of the most beautiful birds for their collections, signaling a turn from the discovery of the new to collecting for the sake of the favorite, most exotic, or most dramatic species.

At the same time, around 1860, in America, James Audubon’s family began to republish his original images as chromolithographs (the so-called “Bien edition”), in the same scale, but more affordable than the engraved and hand colored originals.. However, before this edition could be completed, the Civil War broke out, ending luxury printing in North America for the duration of the war (and, unfortunately or the Audubons, bankrupting the family). I have chosen to terminate my exhibition’s ambitions at this juncture.

The images shown here begin with the earliest years, around 1565 to 1600, but most are from 1730 to around 1870 and represent the wide variety of publications produced in Western Europe and America during this most exciting era of discovery and dissemination.