Word: audubon
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Nearly 100 years ago, the first great U. S. bird painter, John James Audubon. finished his huge folio of 435 hand-colored engravings, in a subscribed edition of 161. Until last fortnight it stood as the one monumental achievement in American bird-portraiture. But compared with Audubon's 489 supposedly distinct species. Rex Brasher (pronounced Bray-sher) has done 900 plates showing 1,200 species of North American birds. Every coloration difference due to age, sex, season or (as with the caracara) attitude, has been shown, bringing the total of figures to 3.000. All are based on sketches drawn...
...amateur Ornithologist Philip Marston Brasher (for whom the Brasher warbler was named), Rex early heard his father's criticisms of the famed Audubon bird plates which often carry naturalism, composition and color beyond the point of probability. In 1879, aged 10, Rex Brasher decided to paint all the birds in North America himself. After his father died, he learned taxidermy, went to St. Francis College (Brooklyn) and at 15 to work in the engraving department of Tiffany & Co. No longer prosperous was his family, whose founder, according to the family legend, had come to Manhattan in 1621 as the wealthy...
...subscribers, leafing last week through the twelve handsome volumes, each 13 by 18 in. and 2 in. thick, inevitably measured Brasher against his predecessors. All critics agree that Audubon's beautiful plates take liberties. Many of his birds are wrong in proportion, action, color and anatomy as well as in the conventional classification of Audubon's time (particularly the flycatcher family). A genius, unwilling to allow any plate to be un-notable, Audubon often made his birds unrealistically spectacular. Critics perceive that Brasher has heId faithfully to the probable background and the actual bird, rarely permitting himself a flourish...
...Audubon's friends made him the rival of Alexander Wilson, so Brasher's have pitted his work against that of the late Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Married, facing the compulsion of supporting his fam ily. Fuertes wanted to paint all North American birds but had to limit himself chiefly to illustration work. He encouraged and helped Rex Brasher, adding his own great bird erudition and subtle eye for bird character to Brasher's. Rex Brasher alone has had simultaneously the time, the ability, the monumental persistence, the hardheaded fidelity to do all the birds of North America...
...Audubon's three largest and finest canvases, an oil painting of "Black Cocks" on a grouse moor, has just been presented to the University Museum by Mr. John Eliot Thayer '85, of Lancaster, Massachusetts. Mr. Thayer has recently given the University Museum his great collection of birds' eggs and nests...