Rare and Wondrous: Birds in Art and Culture, 1620–1820

Thousands of specimens were brought back from around the world (frequently with the unacknowledged assistance and expertise of local, often Indigenous, populations and enslaved people).

Monarchs and wealthy professionals collected live birds in aviaries and displayed preserved specimens in cabinets of curiosities; middle-class families kept them as pets; and fashionable women wore their feathers as accessories. 

Artists sketched and painted them, recording and contributing to their cultural impact. Rare and Wondrous explores this love of exotic birds and the often complicated histories and consequences of their encounters with European culture.

Though they had made their way to Northern Europe since at least the 13th century, ostrich eggs were increasingly in demand as European trade with Africa (in goods as well as enslaved humans) increased in the 1500s. 

Aristocrats and wealthy merchants desired them for their cabinets of curiosities—collections of objects meant to represent a “theater of the universe.” When the remarkable eggs were transformed by the skill of the goldsmith into fanciful goblets, they became doubly prized.

Ole Worm, physician to Christian IV of Denmark, kept a pet Great Auk as part of his renowned Copenhagen cabinet of wonders. The population of this now extinct flightless seabird declined greatly by the 1700s after they and their eggs were exploited as food for European sailors

and as curiosities for natural history collections. The last surviving pair was killed in 1844. The engraving in this book documenting Worm’s collection is the only known likeness of a Great Auk taken from a live bird.

In 1734, Amsterdam apothecary Albertus Seba began to publish a four-volume, illustrated catalogue of the contents of his famous cabinet of natural wonders. 

A shareholder in the Dutch East India Trading Company, he worked with sailing crews to procure exotic plants and animals for medical applications (knowledge usually provided by local, often Indigenous, populations).

Intrigued by what he was receiving, Seba eventually expanded his collecting scope, establishing a network of contacts as far-flung as Greenland, Sri Lanka, and Virginia with whom he could acquire specimens or share knowledge. 

Seba’s resulting vast collection included specimens of birds, but also their nests, including hanging constructions like the weaver bird nest at the center of this hand-colored engraving.

Mathurin-Jacques Brisson’s landmark six-volume study of birds, Ornithology, was the most complete, systematic ornithological study at the time it was published in 1760.

Brisson was the caretaker in Paris to the largest collection of natural history specimens in Europe at the time, a large proportion of which was preserved skins of birds from around the world.

Ornithology included descriptions of 1,136 birds, 320 of which had never been represented in an ornithological study before. François-Nicolas Martinet, engraver to King Louis XV, produced the 261 plates illustrating 500 birds.

The Blue-and-Yellow Macaw is native to the northern half of South America. The first macaws were brought to Europe not long after Columbus invaded the Americas. They became popular birds for menageries and natural history collections, and later, as pets for the wealthy.

Europeans were unable to successfully breed them until the 19^th century, so their continued presence on the continent before then relied on frequent trade with the colonies in Brazil, Guyana, and Suriname, fueled by slave labor.

Brisson’s Ornithology was not issued with hand-colored plates. The original owner of Toledo’s volumes either commissioned a colorist, or perhaps painted the plates themselves—a popular household pastime in the 18th century. 

The colorist likely had not seen many of the birds depicted or chose to make their own aesthetic choices, since many of the colors do not match the birds’ actual plumage, as with this Spot-billed Pelican.

The comte de Buffon was curator of Louis XV’s natural history collection, on which he based his 44-volume Natural History, one of the most important works on natural history in the 18^th century. 

The king’s cabinet included specimens of more than 800 preserved species of birds, many of them from the far-flung colonies and trading partners of France. The pair of Paradise Wydahs depicted here are native to Sub-Saharan Africa. Live wydahs were sold as cage birds in Europe.

Among the trappings of Colonial Boston prosperity John Singleton Copley included in his portrait of a well-heeled little girl is a domesticated Red-headed Lovebird, a small parrot species. 

Keeping birds as pets—usually local songbirds—was long established in both Europe and the American colonies. But as more European traders brought foreign birds home, exotic species became increasingly common features of wealthy and even middle-class homes.

The particular species shown in this painting points more specifically to the source of much of Boston's wealth: chattel slavery. 

The Red-headed Lovebird is largely native to central and western Africa and made its way to the Americas on ships transporting enslaved Africans. Copley himself is known to have enslaved at least three people.

Perhaps the most famous of all extinct birds, the flightless Dodo lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. At the time that naturalist George Edwards included it in his study of birds, the Dodo had already been extinct for a century.

When Dutch sailors arrived on Mauritius in the 16^th century, they found them easy to kill, while the pigs and rats they brought on their ships fed on the Dodo’s eggs. 

The first written record of the Dodo was made in 1599 and the last credible sighting was in the 1660s, a swift and tragic consequence of expanded European exploration and colonization.

Interest in the study and depiction of birds of the world was not, of course, exclusive to European cultures. The 17^th-century Indian artist Ustad Mansur, for example, made the earliest known color depiction of the famous Dodo.

This watercolor of a male Chestnut-bellied Sandgrouse was painted by an unknown Indian artist likely from Lucknow—the diminutive landscape is a stylistic feature of artists working in that city .

It was probably painted for an officer of the commercial trading and colonial enterprise the British East India Company. Company employees commissioned local artists to depict Indian birds and animals.

The Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory employed painters who specialized in bird imagery. They often used as sources the illustrated bird books that proliferated during the second half of the 18^th century.

Including those by British ornithologist George Edwards (see his illustration of a Dodo in this exhibition).

Many of the birds are depicted with colors that are more decorative than accurate, including the pastel-hued dove and parrot on this monteith, a vessel that was filled with ice or cold water to keep wine glasses cool.

The Preposterous Head Dress pokes fun at the fashion of the day for flamboyantly tall hairstyles embellished with ribbons, waxed fruit, decorative objects, and especially long plumes from the wing of an ostrich. 

Matthew Darly’s satirical print shows an amusingly exaggerated version of the elite hairstyle, interwoven with vegetables and so tall that the hairdresser must stand on a footstool to apply a plethora of plumes.

The humorous image hides a darker story, however. Ostrich plumes became so in demand from fashionable socialites that the North African subspecies of the bird was hunted nearly to extinction. 

Eventually, in the 19^th century, farming of ostriches in South Africa helped to meet the demand for ornamental feathers without killing the birds.