Game Birds and Wild-Fowl of Great Britain and Ireland

Abstract

MR. THORBURN is without a peer, one may almost say without a rival, in the delineation of birds. He succeeds in combining fidelity of detail with breadth of handling which must satisfy at once the most scrupulous ornithologist and the most fastidious art critic. His latest work lies before me to prove that his hand and his eye act together as cunningly as ever; but he indicates in his preface that, being weary of producing “scientific plates of species,” in the present volume he has aimed at representing birds in their natural surroundings. The result is not uniformly satisfying. While in some of this sumptuous series of plates the landscape is subdued in tone and provides a quiet setting or background for the birds (as in Plate 14, representing brent and pink-footed geese on a tidal ooze), in some other plates it tends to overpower them. The artist secured happier effect in the charming vignettes with which he illustrated the late Lord Lilford's “British Birds” the natural environment of the species being delicately, but effectively, rendered by little more than a suggestion of landscape. Further, the effect of a snowy background in Nature must be to obliterate both colour and detail, the birds relieved against it appearing in dark silhouette; whereas the black grouse in Plate 2 and the pheasants in Plate 7 are painted in hues as vivid as they would appear if the birds had sat for their portraits in Mr. Thorburn's studio.

Game Birds and Wild-Fowl of Great Britain and Ireland.

Written and illustrated by A. Thorburn. Pp. vii + 79 + 30 plates. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1923.) 105s. net.