Aves, Birds
Description:
Figures 1 and 2 depict two small hummingbirds, each of which appear to be either plummeting from a height or flying at a downward angle. The large bird below them, figure 4, is a Bird of Paradise, and is also flying or falling in a diagonal descent. Figure 3 depicts another hummingbird, slightly larger than the first two, resting on its nest. A tiny egg (figures "A" and "B") floats upright on either side of the nest.
Copyright:
Copyright 2009, Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
Accession Number:
Thordarson T 4136
Associated Places
The British MuseumAmong the Numbers whom Curiosity prompted to get a Sight of this Collection, I was of Course one; but the Time allowed to view it was so short, and the Rooms so numerous, that it was impossible, without some Kind of Directory, to form a proper Idea / of the Particulars. (Dodsley xiv)Eric Gidal notes that the British Museum was unique in this unprecedented degree of access granted to the public: "As an institution founded ‘not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and curious, but for the general use and benefit of the public,’ the British Museum marked a union of legitimization and freedom both aesthetic and social" (21). With free admission came crowds, and with those crowds came anxiety regarding who ought to see the collections as well as how they ought to be seen. Over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the museum continued to gain popularity. By 1805, 12,000 people visited annually. By 1817 that number grew to 40,000, and by 1833 over 210,00 people came each year to see the collections (Goldgar 229-30). As many reviewers noted, large and often raucous crowds were now an inescapable part of the museum-going experience:
[T]he bustling crowds which thrice-a-week are to be seen in the British Museum, swarming with aimless curiosity from room to room, loudly expressing their wonder and disapprobation of the very things most worthy of admiration, or passing with a vacant gaze those precious relics of antiquity, of which it is impossible that they can understand the value as they are, for the most part, insensible to the hallowing associations, which render these objects the links of connexion between distant ages and our own. (“A Visit to the British Museum” 42)The behavior of these crowds generated considerable anxiety in the press, with one 1839 reviewer even going so far as to publish three “cautions” for visitors to the British Museum and other public exhibitions: “Touch nothing,” “Don’t talk loud,” and “Be not obtrusive” (“Synopsis” 302-3).
Associated Texts
The long title of the Museum Britannicum, a guidebook to the British Museum, is as follows:Subject
“Table XXX, Aves, Birds. Figures 1 to 3 are of humming birds from America, with one bird on a nest, and two separate eggs. Figure 4, Paradisca Regia, or the Kings Bird of Paradise” (Thornton 73-4).Theme
Birds. Classification. Museum. Natural history.Significance
As Judith Pascoe argues in her 2006 book The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors, “[t]o be a collector of hummingbirds in the romantic period was to experience the most inspirational collecting conditions: a seemingly endless supply of new types of birds, each potentially lovelier than the last” (27). The Rymsdyks, then, seem appropriately enthusiastic about the hummingbird: “It has the most beautiful, brilliant and radiant lively colours of all others Birds” (Rymsdyk 84). However, the figures in “Table XXX, Aves, Birds” capture none of the beauty, brilliance, or radiance that the Rymsdyks acknowledge. Although the hummingbirds in Figures 1 and 2 and the Bird of Paradise in Figure 4 are angled in a way that seems to suggest flight, they appear to be plunging downward. Of transporting a hummingbird from America, Rymsdyk writes, “[t]here is no such thing as keeping it alive” (84). One cannot help but think that these images represent the unavoidable death of the specimens rather than depicting anything “lively.” The elder Rymsdyk was best known, after all, for his unflinchingly precise illustration of a fetus in utero, drawn from a cadaver. The hummingbird on the nest in Figure 3 is similarly static, its eggs floating in perfect symmetry in the empty space to either side.There are several Specimens of Humming Birds, it makes a Noise in flying like the Humming of a Bee, and with its little Beak, which exceeds not the Size of a Needle, sucks, the Juice out of Flowers as it flies; it is the smallest of all Birds, but of the most beautiful and lively Colours; there are several Kinds of them of various Sizes, some so small as to weigh no more than the tenth Part of an Ounce; the Indians make very curious Pictures of its Feathers; the Leg and Foot together measure but half an Inch, its whole Trunk not an Inch. (192)As Pascoe notes, many collectors were caught up in the spell of hummingbird-catching: “Hummingbirds elicited that trance of longing in which the collector constantly and pleasurably anticipates the latest new specimen to catch his attention” (31). Although they fail, perhaps, to communicate the full colorful and varied splendor of these specimens, the almost morbid attention to detail in the Rymsdyks’ drawings suggests this same “trance of longing.” Pascoe writes, “Even second-rate hummingbird specimens, a little dull or loose in feather, have the power to fascinate, and one takes a guilty pleasure in looking at the gorgeous dead birds” (26). The Rymsdyks’ colorless drawings have a similar, fascinating pull, inspiring the same guilty pleasure in the viewer who knows that the careful study of a creature beautiful in life often depends upon the isolation of that creature in death and stillness.
Bibliography
“An Account of the British Museum” New London Magazine 4.40 (1788): 377-78. Print.Delineator:
Image Date:
1791