Rare Watercolors of European Birds, 1540-1590

In 1889, the nature enthusiast Nathaniel H. Bishop gifted a trove of 215 16th-century watercolors, all birds save one flying mammal (a bat) in four tooled leather albums to the N-YHS. When the group was accessioned as “European birds,” nothing was known about their provenance and they were dated to the 18th century. Subsequent sleuthing has uncovered a fascinating history that dates them earlier and helps reconstruct a missing chapter in Renaissance science and ornithological illustration. They are part of a vast group involving international interconnections between humanists and reformists—a network of artists and scientists—engaged in cataloguing of natural phenomena. These rarae aves belong to two projects that also include 585 watercolors in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (some copies of N-YHS watercolors), as well as two caches in the Middleton Collection of University of Nottingham and in the Albert E. Lownes Collection of Hay Library of Brown University (some are copies of works in the N-YHS and BnF), swelling the number to one thousand. A portion even predate the first illustrated ornithological treatises published (1555): Pierre Belon’s L’histoire de la nature des oyseaux… and Konrad Gesner’s Qui est de avium natura, part of his Historia animalium.

Roberta J.M. Olson and Alexandra Mazzitelli, “The Discovery of a Cache of Over 200 Sixteenth-Century Avian Watercolors: A Missing Chapter in the History of Ornithological Illustration,” Master Drawings 45:4 (2007): 435¬–521.

Roberta J.M. Olson, “Les dessins d’oiseaux de Pierre Eskrich et Cie. et la question des échanges entre Genève et Lyon,” in Lyon Renaissance: Art et Humanisme, exh. cat. (Lyon: Musée des Beaux-Arts; Paris:Somogy, 2015), 88–97, 120–129.