Birds: Ornithology and the Great Bird Artists

Description

In Birds, devout birder and ornithologist Roger J. Lederer celebrates the heyday of avian illustration in 40 artists' profiles, beginning with the work of Flemish painter Frans Snyders in the early 1600s and continuing through to contemporary artists like Elizabeth Buttersworth, famed for her portraits of macaws. Stretching its wings across time, taxa, geography, and artistic style - from the celebrated realism of American conservation icon John James Audubon, to Elizabeth Gould's nineteenth-century renderings of museum specimens from the Himalayas, to Swedish artist and ornithologist Lars Jonsson's ethereal watercolours - this book is a cornucopia of art and artists as diverse and beautiful as their subjects.

Dr Roger J. Lederer is an ornithologist and emeritus professor of biological sciences at California State University who has spent more than 40 years studying and writing about birds. He has written several books, including Latin for Bird Lovers, Beaks, Bones, and Bird Songs and Pacific Coast Bird Finder, as well as over 30 scientific papers. He has been a consultant on birds for the BBC, National Geographic, Vanity Fair, Fox TV, ABC News and Conde Nast and writes a blog at Ornithology.com.

'[Birds] makes any bird painting aficionado yearn for more' * Wall Street Journal * 'Art history and the history of science intertwine in this beautiful tribute to the scientific illustration of birds' * American Scientist * 'Exquisite ... Ornithological gems such as Joseph Wolf's gorgeous Crimson-bellied Tragopan, Roger Tory Peterson's flock of flamingos in the Andes, and James Fenwick Lansdowne's rainbow-plumed Chinese pheasant reveal not only the sophistication of avian art, but the extravagant global variety of avian species' -- Laurence A. Marschall, Natural History 'People have been trying to depict birds for 40,000 years, but Lederer suggests that their efforts really took flight some four hundred years ago, in the work of Flemish artists such as Frans Snyders (Concert of Birds) and Carel Fabritius (The Goldfinch)' * Apollo * 'Beginning in the seventeenth century with the Flemish baroque period and continuing to the present, this book is a treasure trove of beautiful artwork and beautiful birds ... Full-color reproductions (many full page), mostly of paintings, lead readers through a history of art and artwork and of how the Western world has viewed birds since the 1600s. The artists are grouped mostly by time period but also by theme, as exploration and the scientific age changed the nature of illustration and spurred public interest in the environment and bird watching. Most of the artists are British or American, with a handful of Continental Europeans and artists working in the colonial realms of the time. Several women artists are included, from Lady Elizabeth Symonds Gwillim (1763-1807) to Elizabeth Butterworth (1949-) ... Recommended' * Choice * 'A sumptuous coffee table book, stunningly beautiful in its many full-page reproductions ... Here is a book that will put readers in a celebratory mood and, with the rustling of each page, stir a sense of wonder' * Enterprise-Record *