New Visions in the New World

7/31/2019 New Visions in the New World

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I n 1607 the colony of Jamestown wasfounded in Virginia on the shore of the York River not far from where it

debouched into the Atlantic Ocean. Thesecolonists, Englishmen, came in search of richesgold, to be exact. The PowhatanIndians, a sophisticated agricultural people,perhaps 20,000 strong then, dominated thearea, living in large villages beside their fields.

Young boys sitting on sheltered platforms threwrocks at the animals and birds that tried toeat the three sisterscorn, beans, squashthat bloomed and broadened and bore fruit.Some of the animals the boys pelted as theyperfected their marksmanship were variationson species familiar to the colonists: deer (inhuge numbers), raccoons, skunks, blackbirds,finches, woodpeckers, and pigeons. Other

animals were new and strange: alligators,venomous snakes, beautiful insects andflowers, parti-colored parrots, bison. Bison thatfar east? Yes. Then. To these first Europeans theAmerican 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 fromthe water.

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

By James D. Balestrieri

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

W E S T E R N A R T I N S I G H T S

New Visions NEW WORLD

IN THE


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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 , 1729-43COURTESY ARADER GALLERIES, NEW YORK CITY


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

The world was new and strange. In consideringthe work of first European artists to work in theAmericas, this is the salient fact to bear in mind:that what is unfamiliar simultaneously inspiresfascination and fear. We may look from ourvantage at the works of the earliest European

artists and see them as naive or exaggerated,but to them everything was potentiallyvicious, everything was potentially dangerous,everything was potentially deadly. Beauty anddanger walked and ran and swam and slitheredand fluttered and flew side by side, cheek by

jowl, fang by feather. Everything was eatingand being eaten. The sounds: cries, drones,calls, grunts, must have been deafening. Tothese 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. Withnothing more potent than clumsy matchlockmuskets and small inefficient cannons, imaginelanding in the alien world of Avatar

Born in England in 1682, Mark Catesby

was perhaps the earliest artist to make the floraand fauna of America his principal subject.From 1712-1719, Catesby lived in Virginia,drawing, painting and sending specimensback to the Royal SocietyBritains nationalscientific organizationwhich sponsored hisreturn trip to the Colonies in 1722. That trip ledto 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 watercoloredetchings that are often available as individual,attractive, and very affordable artworks.

Catesbys Mergus , a fearsome, toothycreature, is todays sweet little HoodedMerganser zigzagging along the shore, looking

for fish, crayfish, insects. The renderingexaggerates the tiny teeth in the Mergansersbeak. The size of the hood makes the birdresemble a bulbous-headed giant-brainedmutant. Perhaps the artist merely wantedto emphasize what was new and unusualabout the bird, perhaps the more fearsomethe depiction, the more the Royal Society andpotential subscribers would marvel at Catesbysbravery and endorseand underwritehisefforts. Or perhaps the Merganser, in Catesbys


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perception, is just as he observed it: aggressive,appetitive, fierce.

By contrast, the Blew Linnet and Solanum our Indigo Bunting and Nightshadeappearat first glance to be a delicate, finely drawn,exact botanical and ornithological etching.Nonetheless, there is something vaguelydisturbing about the Solanum, an orchid-likeexoticism that hints at the plants poisonousbeautyit isnt called deadly nightshade fornothing. The bunting, however, is unperturbed.This is his (it is a male) habitat. He is immune.The microscope was in its infancy, leaving oneto wonder how Catesby might have drawn

and etched the smallpox virus, or typhus, orany one of the diseases that took more livesEuropean and Native Americanthan war orwild animals.

Scratching himself against or smashing downthis rose acacia treedepicted out of scaleto show the blossoms and leavesCatesbysBison is a dark, wild, dumb destructive beast,far removed from the placid half-cow wesaved from extinction a century ago and breednow out of a sense of nostalgia and a need

for occasional relief from beef burgers. ThatCatesby saw bison, buffalo, in the Carolinasalone makes his endeavor invaluable; thisetching is a portal that takes the viewer beyondour imagination, back to an earlier America.

William Bartram was born in Pennsylvaniain 1739. The son of a botanist, Bartram traveledextensively, covering the same territory asCatesby but also venturing further, to Georgia,Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana. Bartrampublished his Travels in 1791 to great acclaim,returned to Pennsylvania and, according toF. Turner Reuters essential work Animal and Sporting Artists in America (Middleburg, VA:

National Sporting Library, 2008), remainedthere, even turning down an invitation toaccompany Lewis and Clarks expedition in1803. He spent the rest of his life maintaininghis fathers botanical gardens and studyingbirds. (p. 35)

Bartrams drawing of alligators in Floridarequires little interpretation. With curls of steam emanating from the nostrils of the reptilein the foreground and the elegant rapacity withwhich the second beast gnaws on and prepares

to slide a fish down its gullet, these resembleClaymation dinosaurs from the silent filmversion of Conan Doyles The Lost World or King Kong . Yet, to eyes that had never seen sucha creature, how else could an alligator haveseemed? And, to be fair, Bartram has capturedthe essence of the alligator, its indifferentamoral menace. In fact, the work raises thekey dilemma in wildlife art, the balance thatthe artist must strike between accuracythatis, fidelity to anatomyand expressiveness,meaning that quality which conveys somethingabout the animals nature.

Alexander Wilson, a Scot born in 1766,

was a wanderer and poet and lover of nature,especially of birds. Wilsons satirical versederiding the treatment of textile workerscaught him in the warp and woof of Scottishpolitics and he fled to the United Statesin 1794. Wilson settled in Pennsylvania; hisneighbornone other than William Bartramchanneled Wilsons love of birds and soon thefailed Scottish poet began to sketch and plana comprehensive American Ornithology ,a work which eventually ran to nine volumes

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


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



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and occupied the artist-naturalist for the rest of his life as he traversed much of the young andexpanding nation, often on foot through dismalswamps in dreadful weather. Wilson met John

James Audubon in Louisville and it is certainthat the man who would become Americasmost celebrated painter of birds and animals

took at least some of his inspiration from theitinerant ornithologist.

Wilsons illustrations, by contrast withCatesby and Bartram, begin to bring Americanspecies into the realm of the familiar. Oneof Wilsons plates, the Ducks , does raise aninteresting point in view of 18 th-century naturalphilosophy. The shape of life in the universewas thought to be a great chain of beingstretching 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: anytwo adjacent species would contain an infinitenumber of species that partook of elementsof each. Gods universe, thus, was as full aspossible, a plenitude. Leaving aside themany inherent thorns in the theory, consider

Wilsons Ducks . The plate is full, replete witha variety of species, plenitude. The Europeansthat came to the teeming continent might wellhave wondered whether there would be roomfor them.

The other plates, of the Carolina Parrot and the Passenger Pigeon , offer evidenceof once abundant speciesthe PassengerPigeons once darkened the skies, numberingin the billionsthat are now extinct. As a soberreminder that man-made extinction events

are by no means limited to our innocent pastand that songbirds in particular have sufferedthe loss of habitat, the effects of pollutionand pesticide, and the introduction of alienpredatorshouse cats allowed to roam free,to take but one exampletwo of the three

birds that accompany the Carolina ParrottheCanada Flycatcher and the Green Black-cappedFlycatcherare now endangered. Were it notfor the relatively stable population of theHooded Flycatchersince renamed WilsonsWarbler after the artistthis entire platemight soon represent an unrecoverable past,a lost plenitude.

The foothold of the Europeans grew. The goldthe Jamestown colonists found was tobacco,tobacco and land. Europeans dominated theEastern Seaboard and pushed inland, westward.The colonists severed ties with England andfounded their own country. To the animals,as to the Native Peoples, the Europeans musthave seemed a strange and dangerous species.Early depictions and descriptions of Europeansby Native Americans that survive attest to this.But the plants and animals, the birds and bisonand alligators left no record of their perceptionsas the colonists colonized. These we can onlyinfer; 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 assistancewith this article.

About James D. Balestrieri Jim Balestrieri isdirector of J. N.Bartfield Galleriesin New York City.He also writesthe Scottsdale Art

Auction catalogueand, during thesale, can be found screaming out

phone bids. Jimhas written plays,

verse, prose, and screenplays. He has degreesfrom Columbia and Marquette universities,attended the American Film Institute and has an MFA in Playwriting from Carnegie-Mellon. He has an excellent wife and threeenthusiastic children who, he insists, will work in finance or science, though they aretaking an unhealthy interest in the arts.

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

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New Visions in the New World