![]() In “Secrets of the Friendly Woods,” he wrote about nature with a mix of genial animism and psychological insight. ![]() He was keenly interested in making accurate images of birds, but he was also interested in learning from birds. Brasher might be considered the patron saint of that project. Gilbert Pearson, who helped found the organization that would ultimately become the National Audubon Society (“When you see a Brasher bird, you have seen the bird itself, lifelike and in a natural attitude”).īetween the early days of the artist-woodsman ornithologists and the death of Brasher a century and a half later, the science of ornithology spun off a vital and flourishing adjunct: birdwatching. ![]() He was praised by naturalists including John Burroughs (“he is the greatest bird painter of all time”) and T. Today, a complete set of his printed work can fetch more than $40,000. Later, when he began hand-coloring more than 87,000 individual plates for publication, the project attracted subscriptions from collectors and patrons, as well as universities and libraries. But his life’s project to document American birds, an effort to outdo Audubon that began in the 1890s and continued into the 1920s, was celebrated in its day, with an exhibition at the Explorers Hall of the National Geographic Society in 1938. Born in 1869, Brasher left an enormous body of paintings, almost 900 large-scale watercolors documenting American bird life and habitat, that became the source material for a monumental 12-volume compendium of hand-colored reproductions published as “Birds & Trees of North America.” He also made an unknown number of miscellaneous paintings and drawings, wrote a delightfully eccentric volume of philosophical reflections called “ Secrets of the Friendly Woods,” and penned a hand-illustrated autobiographical account of his early forays, by sailboat, to document waterfowl from New England to Florida.īrasher was a retiring artist - a modest man who lived much of his life off the grid - which may be one reason he isn’t more famous.
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