Many years ago, when I was a fledgling art critic living on a council estate in east London, I had a witty meeting with a policeman. I’d been travelling around looking at shows — notably at the excellent John Hansard Gallery in Southampton — and was returning home with a bag full of catalogues and, also, a pair of binoculars that I used for birdwatching.
In those days I was a keen twitcher. I considered birds to be flying works of art, with their subtle colours, inventive designs and endless variability. For me, art and birds were almost interchangeable.
On holidays I either went to places that supplied great art in museums and churches, or I went to look for great birds. Who could forget Costa Rica, with its stunning quetzals and the catchy bit of design that is the jabiru stork. Or Crete, where the swooping pink lammergeier cuts through the air like a hot knife through butter.
Back in Britain, if I was seeing shows outside London, I would often take my bins and hope for a sighting. The second best thing about the John Hansard Gallery, after its art, is its proximity to the New Forest. So after the show I had gone in search of the elusive Dartford warbler. It’s there, if you can find it. I didn’t.
Coming back, the train to Waterloo was delayed, as usual, so it was late evening by the time I finally made it to my estate in Hackney, where we had recently had a spate of robberies. All sorts of stuff had gone missing. Everyone was on the lookout. And as I walked home down a dark alley, a police officer loomed out of the shadows and stopped me.
“Can I ask where you’ve been, sir?” he inquired. “And where you’re going?”
I explained that I was an art critic, and that I had been away looking at exhibitions. I was now heading home and lived just over there. He asked me to open the bag I was carrying. Lying on top of a pile of art catalogues were my expensive birdwatching binoculars, which he picked up and examined.
“I see, sir,” he drawled sarcastically. “Was the art a long way away?”
I wasn’t arrested. But it was close.
Since then I have generally kept the two pastimes separate, travelling to Rome for the Caravaggios and Extremadura for the great bustards. But with my consciousness expanded by that sarky copper, I have also taken a keener interest in the appearance of birds in art. There are a lot of them. One of the deeper pleasures of my mature years as an art critic has been going birdwatching in art galleries. I recommend it. It leads to exciting viewings.
For instance, if you look closely at Piero della Francesca’s gorgeous Nativity in the National Gallery in London, you will see two bird species:
In the bushes at the front there are some goldfinches. And sitting on the roof of the stable is a magpie. What are they doing there?
Goldfinches pop up often in Renaissance art, in Nativity scenes or cradled by the baby Jesus. It’s because they have a bright splash of red on their chin and forehead, as if they have dipped their beaks into a bowl of blood. In Nativities they prefigure Jesus’s bloody death on the Cross. When Carel Fabritius painted his famous picture of a goldfinch chained to its perch he was probably painting something secretly religious: a symbolic Crucifixion.
The magpie on Piero’s stable roof is another dark reminder of Jesus’s fate because magpies were thought to be the bird of death. Pieter Bruegel made the message clear in his celebrated painting of a magpie sitting on a gallows: the magpie was the gallows bird. We remain dimly aware of its symbolic past when we repeat the famous prediction: “One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy…”
But not all birds in art are there for doomy reasons. One of my favourite British species, the chough, is a crow, like the magpie. But it lives on the coast and, with its curved red beak and postbox-coloured legs, it brings an exotic note to the clifftops.
Choughs fly haphazardly, like a piece of paper taken up by the wind: left, right, down, up. They’re thrilling to watch. But also rare. You have to travel to the ends of Wales or the tip of Cornwall to see a chough. Unless, of course, you are in London and can pop into the National Gallery to look at Van Dyck’s Balbi Children.
There at the feet of the sweetly painted Balbi kids is a pair of pet choughs. Van Dyck probably intended to imply some correlation between the impish, lively spirit of the delightfully painted birds and the three ornate children. That said, Giotto probably had something deeper in mind when he included a pair of choughs among the animals St Francis is talking to in that beautiful altarpiece in the Louvre that shows him receiving the stigmata. It’s those damn red feet, I warrant.
Owls are particularly busy in art. Hieronymus Bosch was clearly something of an owl-hater because they pop up all over his output as symbols of the Devil. Satan was a shapeshifter. He could be anywhere, looking like anything. So in the famous Garden of Earthly Delights, Bosch’s wildly adored masterpiece, Satan, having caused Eve to seduce Adam and get us chucked out of Paradise, is sitting in a hole in a tree, staring at us fiercely:
He’s in the next panel as well, a giant tawny owl here, a barn owl there, causing mischief and disgrace wherever he swoops. The bird of the night has infected our days.
We’re getting gloomy again. Sorry. As any experienced birdwatcher will tell you, if the location isn’t delivering, move on. So a good place to dart into next is the Victoria and Albert Museum, where they have the giant Raphael cartoons to enjoy: perhaps the greatest Renaissance artworks in Britain. In The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, Raphael has drawn a trio of perfect European cranes, waiting for the catch. I’ve seen these birds in Poland. They’re very rare here. Except in Raphael.
