And now for something completely different - Parrots in art

[MKparrot]

And now, for something completely different! (to paraphrase Monty Python's famous catchphrase

)

 

Parrots (and parrot lowers) are not all about training, feeding, clipping, taming and poop cleaning:rolleyes:. Parots, ladies and gentlemen, are also about art.

 

Few years ago “The Parrot in Art from Durer to Elizabeth Butterworth” exhibition was held in Birmingham UK . Strictly speaking, this discursive exploration of the parrot’s place in the history of art begins not with Durer but a little earlier. Its first image is a slightly foxed, battered but moving little woodcut, created by an unknown German artist in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. The subject of the picture is the Christ child and on his lap he holds a parrot – to be specific, a Long-tailed Green Parakeet – cradling it in such a way that its head brushes his cheek. It seems that the print was originally designed as a New Year’s greeting card. The image of Christ and the prophetic parrot – bearer of good news about the future – was intended to bring a message of hope for the year to come.

 

Nearby, Martin Schongauer’s late fifteenth-century engraving of The Virgin with a Parrot, introduces the creature into a scene of the Madonna and Child. Seated by a window, the Virgin holds open a book with one hand while supporting the infant Jesus with another. He plays with the eponymous parrot, which inclines its head towards him with appropriate deference.

 

As well as securing a walk-on part in images of the Holy Family, the parrot also migrated into the Garden of Eden. The parrot appears in Durer’s great early sixteenth-century engraving of The Fall of Man. Perched just above the figure of Adam, who looks questioningly towards the Eve, as she proffers him an apple, Durer’s parrot is implicitly contrasted with the devious serpent, twined around the trunk of the Tree of Knowledge. The benevolent bird looks away from the scene of temptation, as if pained by the sight of the Fall of Man. The sprig of mountain ash which supports the parrot also supports a tablet of wood bearing a prominent inscription that declares “Albrecht Durer of Nuremberg made this 1504”. The particular bird that modelled for the Eden parrot may have been actually owned by the painter. Durer made two other drawings of the same creature – an Alexandrine or Ring-necked Parakeet – in the early years of the sixteenth century. One of the revelations of this show, in fact, is just how many artists have owned parrots – Reynolds, Edward Lear, William Nicholson. Perhaps it is partly because the birds are nature’s equivalent of a palette, loaded with colour.

 

The exhibition “The Parrot in Art from Durer to Elizabeth Butterworth” was the brainchild of Richard Verdi, Director of the Barber Institute, not only a distinguished art historian but a lifelong parrot aficionado. He claimed that the earliest parrot brought to Europe was a member of the same species as the bird Durer may have owned. He stated that the first parrots imported into Europe came from India and among their earliest recorded owners was Macedonian Conqueror Alexander the great, who, after conquering the Persian Empire, drove his army to the Punjab in 327 BC. On his return he brought back with him a green parrot with a rose-pink collar and blue cheeks that has subsequently come to bear his name: the Alexandrine Parakeet. The parrot was destined from then on to enjoy a favoured status in the ancient world. Aristotle, Pliny and Apuleius wrote at length about it, focussing upon its intelligence and powers of speech. It also forms the subject of one of Aesop’s Fables and of an elegy by Ovid of c. 15 BC, which mourns the passing of a beloved parrot nearly two millennia before Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch

 

As it moved into the later Renaissance and beyond, Verdi’s exhibition increasingly explored parrots in the secular rather than sacred context. A prominent Blue-fronted Amazon parrot stands on the dinner table in the company of William Brooke, 10th Lord Cobham and His Family. The bird’s appearance here suggests the extent to which it had become a kind of status symbol among the European aristocracy – loved not only for its colour, exoticism and rarity, but also for its ability to inspire affection and mimic human behaviour. Less than half a century before Brooke had his portrait painted, the poet John Skelton had encapsulated the bird’s appeal among the royalty and aristocracy of the time: “With my beak bent, my little wanton eye, / My feathers fresh as is the emerald green, / About my neck a circulet like the rich ruby, / My little legs, my feet both feat and clean, / I am a minion to wait upon a queen.”

 

In Holland too, parrots stood for status, becoming the avian equivalent of the tulip – brightly coloured, highly sought after and subtly symbolic of the reach and the spread of Dutch maritime trade and economic power. Jan Fyt’s mid-seventeenth century A Still Life with Fruit, Dead Game and a Parrot shows an African Grey Parrot . A Scarlet Macaw, occupies Jacob Fransz Van der Merck’s Still Life with Fruit and Parrot. Perched by the window in an interior so impossibly heaped with fruit and fabric and fine porcelain that it resembles a cornucopia, the bird’s splendid plumage is contrasted with the grey clouds of a Dutch evening sky.

 

These are innocent parrots but later representations of the bird are fraught with erotic meaning. During the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the parrot became an image of sexual lust and longing. Wistful women alone in their boudoirs contemplate their pet parrots as they dream of their distant lovers. The most famous examples of the genre are by Manet, by Courbet, by Renoir. The exhibition also included two wonderful lesser known paintings: A Woman in a Red Jacket Feeding a Parrot, by the seventeenth-century painter from Leiden, Frans van Mieris the Elder; and Giambattista Tiepolo’s smouldering Young Woman with a Macaw, a capriccio executed by the greatest Venetian painter of the eighteenth century for Empress Elisabeth Petrovna of Russia. A blushing young lady, in décolletage so low-cut as to reveal her right breast, stares into space. The parrot she caresses looks out at the spectator with a sharp, proprietorial gaze.

 

The exhibition also included, among much else, a fine Goya of superstitious fools treating a parrot as an oracle, as well as Edwin Landseer’s comically anthrophomorphised portrait of Queen Victoria’s favorite parrot, an ineffably superior Scarlet Macaw. It concluded with a number of breathtakingly acute and subtle natural history illustrations by the preeminent modern painter of parrots, Elizabeth Butterworth.

[MKparrot]

...and here is the one with Grey:)

[kins2321@yahoo.com]

I LOVED it! I tried to make it bigger,each picture, but the art was fantastic! Nancy

[Timbersmom]

Very interesting! Thanks for posting this.

[Inara]

Wonderful information and art history! I'll be sure from now on, however, not to be found "contemplating" my parrot in my boudoir!

[danmcq]

Nice, thanks for sharing this!

[danmcq]

Wonderful information and art history! I'll be sure from now on, however, not to be found "contemplating" my parrot in my boudoir!

 

Little nuances that makes one go "Hmmmmmmm".

[Inara]

Little nuances that makes one go "Hmmmmmmm".

 

You're one to squawk, erm talk !! hahaha And I really did mean contemplate and parrot!! smartypants!

[Muse]

...and here is the one with Grey:)

 

I am betting that parrot posed for his portrait on a perch, and not with all that fruit. Or the picture may have taken a decidedly messier turn for the worse. We used to lay out fruit and veggies on platters for the Greybies in the aviary. They loved it but the end result was NOT pretty!

[Muse]

I found parrots in the boudoir to have the opposite effect. Very hard to be romantic with the husband when Megan's yelling, "Oh no, eat my finger!" and making both of us crack up laughing.