Art: Bird Museum

Month ago Reginald I. (“Rex”) Brasher (pronounced Bray-sher) signed a contract with Connecticut in which that State agreed to build within two years a museum to house his collection of North American bird drawings—a collection which some experts rate as the best since John James Audubon (TIME, Sept. 12, 1932).* By last week almost all of “Rex” Brasher’s 874 original pictures, valued by him at $500,000, had been moved to the State Capitol vaults at Hartford.

As unusual as Brasher’s bird pictures will be the museum Connecticut intends to build in the Berkshires’ Kent State Park. It will be a round, three-story structure, capable of holding 2,500 persons at one time. Visitors will climb ramps from the first floor to a rotunda on the second. There the circular floor space will be divided into twelve pie-like segments. At the end of each segment, facing the rotunda, will be hung the twelve biggest and best Brashers, to be viewed by visitors without moving from the building’s centre. The other Brasher birds will be hung along the segment walls in recesses so arranged that spectators will see only one picture at a time. Estimated cost of the building: $160,000. Since most of the building materials will be concrete and Connecticut stone, the State expects that 90% of the cost will go to labor, hopes therefore to wangle a PWA loan.

More accurate than Audubon, who was inclined to exaggerate and dramatize his birds, “Rex” Brasher has spent most of his 65 years tramping across fields, swamps, beaches, spying on birds and recording their habits in soft, warm colors that suggest Japanese prints. Son of amateur Ornithologist Philip Marston Brasher who gave his name to the Brasher Warbler, he got his art training in Tiffany & Co.’s engraving department and from a Portland, Me. photo-engraver. For stay-at-home ornithologists and bird lovers he has made 100 twelve-volume sets of reproductions, each colored by hand. These sets sell for $2,500 each. Among the purchasers are Ogden Reid, Richard Beatty Mellon, Edward Stephen Harkness. Collectors less rich may buy individual prints for $15, a three-volume set of game birds for $1,000.

* Jean Jacques Fougere Audubon (1785-1851) was born of a seafaring father and a Creole mother in Santo Domingo. Anglicizing his name to John James he went to the U. S. in 1803, launched a series of unsuccessful business enterprises of which one landed him in jail for debt. A hunter and fisherman, he managed to make a living by selling portraits, did not think of publishing his bird pictures until he” was 35. Birds of America, his most famed set of plates, were engraved in London, began appearing in 1827, now fetch $10,000 for a complete set.