Drawn From Nature
       Curated by Bruce Cammack, Fabricated by Lyn Stoll
                  The History of Bird Illustration

            “As long as there are birds – free and beautiful, able
             to sing, to fly, to glisten in the sun – there will be
             men and women unable to resist the temptation to
             capture their grace and spirit with pencil and brush.”   
                Scheffel, R. L.  Bird Art in Science: The Growth of a Tradition, 1964.

At every level of interest in birds, “What does it look like?” is the most universal

question. The ideal practice, of course, is to examine live birds and preserved

specimens.  But birds are at their most accessible in the illustrations found in books.

After the European discovery of the printing press in the mid-15^th century, interest

in the systematic investigation of nature, including birds, increased. Many books of

the period were illustrated with woodcuts, whose uniformity and comparative

abundance provided a considerable advantage over earlier manuscript illustrations.

By the late 16^th century woodcuts were replaced by copper engravings. Some 300

years later, the development of color lithography allowed artists to design directly

in color, rather than to expect their black and white engravings to be later hand

colored.  Thus the excellent realism of recent bird illustration is in some measure

the result of the skillful application of modern color printing techniques. 

The images within this exhibit were selected from Rare Books’ collection of

illustrated natural history.