Birds of fowling (1817-1818)
Ten ways of seeing
- broad 0.70 : 1
First Look
凡画山水，意在笔先。
—— 唐·王维《山水论》
In painting, the intention precedes the brush.
Broad and horizontal: the eye travels side to side. Find where it stops. Then step in close: watch where colour meets line, and whether the line ever breaks. Third, find the darkest small patch: the whole tonal order is measured from there.
Name and Thing
No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. Neither name nor binomial survives: the printed title must do.
Form and Colour
Bird plates usually choose the perched pose: one foot gripping, one loose, the flight feathers laid in first, coverts over them, then the horny gleam of bill and eye.No colour group is recorded. Three things fix the habit: leaf arrangement, tepal count, and how the flower is borne.
Composition
Broad and horizontal — the format for perched, spread-wing or grouped birds. No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. Cover the margins with your thumb and the plate suffocates; uncover them and the flower breathes again.
Line and Colour
The first half of the nineteenth century moved from copper to steel to lithography; stipple could render the softest transition. There is evidence on the back too: the plate mark pressed into the paper, the slight relief of the pigment, lines worn shallow in a later printing. If you mean to copy it: take its skeleton, its margins and the order of its colours; the burin's hatching is the language of copper — suggest it with pencil density, do not imitate it stroke for stroke.
Poetic Resonance
征蓬出汉塞，归雁入胡天。
—— 唐·王维《使至塞上》
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the bird itself becomes its resting point.
Symbolism
In China the crane is longevity, the magpie joy, the wild goose a letter, the eagle prowess; in the Americas each bird carries a different totem. One bird, unrelated meanings. In a flora it is a species first and a symbol second; the order is worth keeping.
Season and Place
Bound to migration: north in spring, south in autumn, each species answering to a few weeks. Audubon's plates often read 'adult, spring' — plumage at its height. Audubon's Birds of America (1827–1838) came from specimens he shot himself, wired into lifelike poses and drawn from life — which is why the birds look so alive, and why the method is uncomfortable. The year 1817 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. Much of what that generation knew of such birds came from specimens and cages; read locality and season both as hearsay.
The Book and the Hand
“Sporting sketches” carries only Henry Thomas Alken's name. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
What to Take Away
Appreciation is not knowledge but habit — one more look each time. The flower of that year is dust, yet its image on paper has outlived every living cousin.
