Animals: Painter of Birds

No 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, but an eye of dull yellow when it throws its head over on its back. Finally, when he is old and all his friends wear feathers, the bird-painter will find that his pictures lose their fidelity to life when reproduced even by an expensive four-color process. He must set to work and copy his own originals by hand. But even that climactic labor was finished last fortnight for Reginald I. (“Rex”) Brasher, 63, of Chickadee Valley near Kent, Conn., who for 53 years has lived toward his objective of painting all the birds of North America.

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 in the field over a period of 44 years.

The son of 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 Frenchman Bras de Fer; one of whose members had commanded the forts in the 1690 Leisler Rebellion; another of whom is reputedly still owed £567 for paying for Manhattan’s City Hall in 1803. Rex Brasher had no art training except at Tiffany’s and at a Port land, Maine photo-engraver’s. At 19 he set sail in a sloop down the Atlantic coast. In one spring afternoon on the deserted waste of Long Island’s Far Rockaway he saw 86 different species of birds. He sold his sloop in Key West and went back to Brooklyn to paint what he had seen. In 1900 he burned the 400 pictures he had. In 1905 he burned most of what he had done over. He figured he could do still better with more time, but he was getting a little panicky. He started the final version.

In 1928 his 900 plates were finished. Printer William Edwin Rudge told him it would cost $500,000 to reproduce them in four colors, losing most of the color exactitude. So Rex Brasher sat down to make a 500 edition of his 900 plates in twelve volumes, each plate to be reproduced in a black-&-white photogravure, then copied from the original in water-colors by himself.

When he had done 100 copies of the first volume in six months, he realized by simple arithmetic that he could not live long enough to finish. He reduced the edition to 100. Before October 1929, 95 of the 100 had been subscribed for at $2,400 the set. After the Wall Street collapse, 60 cancellations came in. Since then subscriptions have risen again to 75, including Cereal Tycoon Will Keith Kellogg, Sportsman Gerard Barnes Lambert, Banker Richard Beatty Mellon, Tycoon Clarence Hungerford Mackay, Connecticut’s Senator Frederic Collin Walcott, President Axtell J. Byles of Tide Water Associated Oil Co.. Airplane Designer William E. Boeing, Author Paul de Kruif, Philanthropist Edward Stephen Harkness, Dr. Evan Evans.

Since 1928 Rex Brasher has transferred the exact watercolor tones of his original plates to 90,000 copies. Assistants helped by filling in sky and background but he personally painted all the arbitrary colors of the bird figures. In summer he worked from 3:30 a. m. to 3 or 4 p. m., in winter from 7 a. m. until 4 p. m. Last week the tall, brown, saturnine man, looking like a grey-haired, mustached Indian, had nothing to do. Thinking of 44 years past, he said: “The hardest jolt was when I found I was through.”

The 75 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. Not a romantic naturalist, he has always gone straight to the nearest example of the bird he wanted. He sketched the golden eagle in the New York Zoological Garden, the valley quail in the Pittsburgh Zoo. When he painted the final pictures, he verified his colors from the bird skin collection of Dr. Jonathan Dwight in Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History. The episode of the pair of golden eagles chasing the redhead ducks (see cut} was reported to him by others. But he has seen a pair of bald eagles so chasing ducks in Connecticut. Too slow for the ducks, one eagle dives at them, drives them down to the water, then the other dives, then the first, and so on for perhaps 15 minutes until the ducks are exhausted, can be caught. In all his paintings, Rex Brasher has made a fetish of getting right the living color of feet, beak and the soft part around the eyes, rarely shown accurately. He spent three days getting a sketch of the comparatively common grasshopper sparrow, a hard-running, covert-loving bird. Once he lay for hours in icy water in Shinnecock Bay to catch the wing sweep of brant blown off shore by a heavy gale. The chickadee and the song sparrow are his favorite birds.

As Audubon’s friends made him the rival of Alexander Wilson, so Brasher’s have pitted his work against that of the late Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Married, facing the compulsion of supporting his fam ily. Fuertes wanted to paint all North American birds but had to limit himself chiefly to illustration work. He encouraged and helped Rex Brasher, adding his own great bird erudition and subtle eye for bird character to Brasher’s. Rex Brasher alone has had simultaneously the time, the ability, the monumental persistence, the hardheaded fidelity to do all the birds of North America.