Word: birde
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...trade for a clerk is bird-painting. A man must be patient, curious, hardy, sharp-eyed, indomitable beyond belief. He must lie immobile in brambles half the years of his life, or crouch in duck boats, shin up tall trees, wiggle all day through burdock. Thus he may discover the true expressions of contentment, fear, anger or mischief never seen in a stuffed bird. He may discover the true color of a bird's bill and feet, which fade quickly after death. He may discover such secrets as that the caracara of the Southwest has a reddish eye normally...
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...
Conferred. On Maurice Maeterlinck, 70, author (The Life of the Bee, The Blue Bird); the title of Count: by Albert, King of the Belgians; in Brussels...