As seen in the September 2011 issue of

WESTERN ART INSIGHTS

Art of the New World was lled with both beauty and danger.

NEW WORLD
By James D. Balestrieri
Young boys sitting on sheltered platforms threw rocks at the animals and birds that tried to eat the three sisterscorn, beans, squash that bloomed and broadened and bore fruit. Some of the animals the boys pelted as they perfected their marksmanship were variations on species familiar to the colonists: deer (in huge numbers), raccoons, skunks, blackbirds, finches, woodpeckers, and pigeons. Other

New Visions
IN THE

n 1607 the colony of Jamestown was founded in Virginia on the shore of the York River not far from where it debouched into the Atlantic Ocean. These colonists, Englishmen, came in search of richesgold, to be exact. The Powhatan Indians, a sophisticated agricultural people, perhaps 20,000 strong then, dominated the area, living in large villages beside their fields.

animals were new and strange: alligators, venomous snakes, beautiful insects and flowers, parti-colored parrots, bison. Bison that far east? Yes. Then. To these first Europeans the American Westin the sense of the frontier, the wilderness, the unknown countrybegan just outside the log palisades of Jamestown, just beyond the clearing, not 200 yards from the water.

Alexander Wilson (1766-1813), Ducks, hand-colored plate from American Ornithology, 1808-1814

COURTESY ARADER GALLERIES, NEW YORK CITY

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Mark Catesby (1682-1749), Blew Linnet and Solanum, hand colored etching from The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, 1729-43
COURTESY ARADER GALLERIES, NEW YORK CITY

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WESTERN ART INSIGHTS

Mark Catesby (1682-1749), Mergus, hand-colored etching from The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, 1729-43
COURTESY ARADER GALLERIES, NEW YORK CITY

The world was new and strange. In considering the work of first European artists to work in the Americas, this is the salient fact to bear in mind: that what is unfamiliar simultaneously inspires fascination and fear. We may look from our vantage at the works of the earliest European artists and see them as naive or exaggerated, but to them everything was potentially vicious, everything was potentially dangerous, everything was potentially deadly. Beauty and danger walked and ran and swam and slithered and fluttered and flew side by side, cheek by jowl, fang by feather. Everything was eating and being eaten. The sounds: cries, drones, calls, grunts, must have been deafening. To these first Europeans, inside the world beyond, beyond the broad, exotically bright leaves of

the endless forest canopy of this New World, this New Eden might lay a Green Hell. With nothing more potent than clumsy matchlock muskets and small inefficient cannons, imagine landing in the alien world of Avatar Born in England in 1682, Mark Catesby was perhaps the earliest artist to make the flora and fauna of America his principal subject. From 1712-1719, Catesby lived in Virginia, drawing, painting and sending specimens back to the Royal SocietyBritains national scientific organizationwhich sponsored his return trip to the Colonies in 1722. That trip led to Catesbys masterpiece, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. Issued in folio in two volumes, the Natural History presents and describes over 300

plants, birds and animals in hand watercolored etchings that are often available as individual, attractive, and very affordable artworks. Catesbys Mergus, a fearsome, toothy creature, is todays sweet little Hooded Merganser zigzagging along the shore, looking for fish, crayfish, insects. The rendering exaggerates the tiny teeth in the Mergansers beak. The size of the hood makes the bird resemble a bulbous-headed giant-brained mutant. Perhaps the artist merely wanted to emphasize what was new and unusual about the bird, perhaps the more fearsome the depiction, the more the Royal Society and potential subscribers would marvel at Catesbys bravery and endorseand underwritehis efforts. Or perhaps the Merganser, in Catesbys

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William Bartram (1739-1823), Alegator, pen and ink, from the Natural History Museum, London
COURTESY THE STATE ARCHIVES OF FLORIDA

perception, is just as he observed it: aggressive, appetitive, fierce. By contrast, the Blew Linnet and Solanum our Indigo Bunting and Nightshadeappear at first glance to be a delicate, finely drawn, exact botanical and ornithological etching. Nonetheless, there is something vaguely disturbing about the Solanum, an orchid-like exoticism that hints at the plants poisonous beautyit isnt called deadly nightshade for nothing. The bunting, however, is unperturbed. This is his (it is a male) habitat. He is immune. The microscope was in its infancy, leaving one to wonder how Catesby might have drawn and etched the smallpox virus, or typhus, or any one of the diseases that took more lives European and Native Americanthan war or wild animals. Scratching himself against or smashing down this rose acacia treedepicted out of scale to show the blossoms and leavesCatesbys Bison is a dark, wild, dumb destructive beast, far removed from the placid half-cow we saved from extinction a century ago and breed now out of a sense of nostalgia and a need

for occasional relief from beef burgers. That Catesby saw bison, buffalo, in the Carolinas alone makes his endeavor invaluable; this etching is a portal that takes the viewer beyond our imagination, back to an earlier America. William Bartram was born in Pennsylvania in 1739. The son of a botanist, Bartram traveled extensively, covering the same territory as Catesby but also venturing further, to Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana. Bartram published his Travels in 1791 to great acclaim, returned to Pennsylvania and, according to F. Turner Reuters essential work Animal and Sporting Artists in America (Middleburg, VA: National Sporting Library, 2008), remained there, even turning down an invitation to accompany Lewis and Clarks expedition in 1803. He spent the rest of his life maintaining his fathers botanical gardens and studying birds. (p. 35) Bartrams drawing of alligators in Florida requires little interpretation. With curls of steam emanating from the nostrils of the reptile in the foreground and the elegant rapacity with which the second beast gnaws on and prepares

to slide a fish down its gullet, these resemble Claymation dinosaurs from the silent film version of Conan Doyles The Lost World or King Kong. Yet, to eyes that had never seen such a creature, how else could an alligator have seemed? And, to be fair, Bartram has captured the essence of the alligator, its indifferent amoral menace. In fact, the work raises the key dilemma in wildlife art, the balance that the artist must strike between accuracythat is, fidelity to anatomyand expressiveness, meaning that quality which conveys something about the animals nature. Alexander Wilson, a Scot born in 1766, was a wanderer and poet and lover of nature, especially of birds. Wilsons satirical verse deriding the treatment of textile workers caught him in the warp and woof of Scottish politics and he fled to the United States in 1794. Wilson settled in Pennsylvania; his neighbornone other than William Bartram channeled Wilsons love of birds and soon the failed Scottish poet began to sketch and plan a comprehensive American Ornithology, a work which eventually ran to nine volumes

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WESTERN ART INSIGHTS

Mark Catesby (1682-1749), Bison, hand-colored etching from The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, 1729-43
COURTESY ARADER GALLERIES, NEW YORK CITY

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are by no means limited to our innocent past and that songbirds in particular have suffered the loss of habitat, the effects of pollution and pesticide, and the introduction of alien predatorshouse cats allowed to roam free, to take but one exampletwo of the three birds that accompany the Carolina Parrotthe Canada Flycatcher and the Green Black-capped Flycatcherare now endangered. Were it not for the relatively stable population of the Hooded Flycatchersince renamed Wilsons Warbler after the artistthis entire plate might soon represent an unrecoverable past, a lost plenitude. The foothold of the Europeans grew. The gold the Jamestown colonists found was tobacco, tobacco and land. Europeans dominated the Eastern Seaboard and pushed inland, westward. The colonists severed ties with England and founded their own country. To the animals, as to the Native Peoples, the Europeans must have seemed a strange and dangerous species. Early depictions and descriptions of Europeans by Native Americans that survive attest to this. But the plants and animals, the birds and bison and alligators left no record of their perceptions as the colonists colonized. These we can only infer; these we can hardly imagine. Authors Note: My thanks to Nina Kreuter and Walter Arader of Arader Galleries and Turner Reuter of Red Fox Fine Art for their assistance with this article.

Alexander Wilson (1766-1813), Carolina Parrot, hand-colored plate from American Ornithology, 1808-1814
COURTESY ARADER GALLERIES, NEW YORK CITY

About James D. Balestrieri

and occupied the artist-naturalist for the rest of his life as he traversed much of the young and expanding nation, often on foot through dismal swamps in dreadful weather. Wilson met John James Audubon in Louisville and it is certain that the man who would become Americas most celebrated painter of birds and animals took at least some of his inspiration from the itinerant ornithologist. Wilsons illustrations, by contrast with Catesby and Bartram, begin to bring American species into the realm of the familiar. One of Wilsons plates, the Ducks, does raise an interesting point in view of 18th-century natural philosophy. The shape of life in the universe was thought to be a great chain of being stretching upward from the mineral realm, through the plants and animals, to man, the angels and, ultimately, God. The number of links in the chain was said to be infinite: any two adjacent species would contain an infinite number of species that partook of elements of each. Gods universe, thus, was as full as possible, a plenitude. Leaving aside the many inherent thorns in the theory, consider Wilsons Ducks. The plate is full, replete with a variety of species, plenitude. The Europeans that came to the teeming continent might well have wondered whether there would be room for them. The other plates, of the Carolina Parrot and the Passenger Pigeon, offer evidence of once abundant speciesthe Passenger Pigeons once darkened the skies, numbering in the billionsthat are now extinct. As a sober reminder that man-made extinction events Jim Balestrieri is director of J. N. Bartfield Galleries in New York City. He also writes the Scottsdale Art Auction catalogue and, during the sale, can be found screaming out phone bids. Jim has written plays, verse, prose, and screenplays. He has degrees from Columbia and Marquette universities, attended the American Film Institute and has an MFA in Playwriting from CarnegieMellon. He has an excellent wife and three enthusiastic children who, he insists, will work in finance or science, though they are taking an unhealthy interest in the arts.

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