The Parrots

Plyctolophus leadbeateri
Leadbeater's cockatoo

Plyctolophus sulphureus
Lesser sulphur-crested cockatoo

Plyctolophus galeritus
Greater sulphur-crested cockatoo

Plyctolophus rosaceus
Salmon-crested cockatoo

Calyptorhynchus baudinii
Baudin's cockatoo

Lorius domicella
Black-capped lory

Macrocercus aracanga
Red and yellow maccaw

Macrocercus ararauna
Blue and yellow maccaw

Psittacara patagonica
Patagonian parrakeet-maccaw

Macrocercus hyacinthinus
Hyacinthine maccaw

Palæornis melanura
Black-tailed parrakeet

Palæornis torquatus
Roseringed parrakeet. Yellow variety

Platycercus palliceps
Paleheaded parrakeet

Platycercus pileatus
Red-capped parrakeet

Psittacula kuhlii
Kuhl's parrakeet

The second youngest of twenty one children, Edward Lear (1812-1888) was raised by his sister and received little in the way of formal education. He was afflicted with both asthma and epilepsy and the latter condition was a source of shame throughout his life. It's tempting to speculate that his health problems were a trigger for the young Lear to avidly pursue so personal an activity as sketching and painting.

Economic reality also played a significant role in the self-taught artist's development. Lear's father was sentenced to a term in the debtor's prison after some disastrous stock speculation and Edward was virtually forced to obtain an income from his sketching by the time he had reached his mid-teens. He coloured drawings for prints, screens and fans for shops and printsellers, drew morbid pictures of diseased people for doctors, taught nature sketching to occasional pupils and sold his own drawings to any paying customer.

Lear's big break came at the age of eighteen when he was taken on as a draughtsman by William Harvey at the Zoological Society in London. The job gave him access to captive living birds and, amazingly, given his age and the logistics involved, he immediately began planning and sketching for a book devoted to parrots (family Psittacidae).

Over a two year period, Lear became proficient in the new illustration printing technique of lithography, thus saving money normally required for employing copperplate engravers. He produced hundreds of sketches of birds from which a final selection of forty two images were chosen for a monograph serving a subscriber base of one hundred and seventy five customers. The book would be the first folio publication in England to be illustrated by lithographs and also the first ornithological work devoted to a single family of birds. Lear also prepared a colour palette key for artists to hand-colour the black and white lithographic plates.

The balance of critical opinion regards Lear's book on parrots to be the finest ever published on that bird family and among the greatest ornithological works ever produced. It's not just because such an audacious project was successfully completed by so young a character, or that the subject matter was drawn so sensitively and with great scientific accuracy and naturalistic detail, but because the exceptional quality of Lear's plates - drawn, wherever possible, from living specimens - would significantly influence the work of two contemporary artists, John James Audubon and John Gould, perhaps the greatest ornithological illustrators of all time. Both Audubon and Gould would employ Lear during the 1830s to assist in their projects and it was only failing eyesight that foreshortened Lear's bird illustrating career.

Lear would of course go on to great fame with his 'nonsense' writing (The Owl and the Pussycat etc.), to which he contributed illustrations; and there were a number of other natural history books he worked on, but his ability to render the fine detail, as he had accomplished with the parrots, had all but left him by the middle of the 1840s. There are fewer than one hundred copies of the parrot book in existence which makes it a very valuable and coveted work.

"Lear’s work as a natural history draftsman lasted little more than the decade of the 1830s, until his eyesight became too weak for the detail of feathers and scales. The Psittacidae is his finest achievement. Lear conveyed with telling sympathy the carriage of a bird, the grasp of the claws, the tilt of the head, its grave, curious, or quizzical expression (noteworthy beaks later reappear as remarkable noses on the limerick people, who are as distinctive as his parrots for their idiosyncratic posture and curious poses). Lear was exceptionally sensitive to the structure and function of features such as the parrot’s beak and the turtle’s jaws (the latter is evident in his lithographs of turtles and tortoises in Thomas Bell’s 'A Monograph of the Testudinata')." [source]

• 'Illustrations of the family of Psittacidae, or parrots: the greater part of them species hitherto unfigured, containing forty-two lithographic plates, drawn from life, and on stone' by Edward Lear, 1832, is available from the Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture at the University of Wisconsin. {click 'Display gallery view' in the sidebar}
• The Remarkable Nature of Edward Lear at The Academy of Natural Sciences (in addition to the parrot illustrations, they have illustrations from 'Gleanings..', a commissioned work on animals and birds from a private estate/zoo).
• Wikipedia / Arader Galleries / biography review / amazon
• Edward Lear homepage - at nonsenselit.
• Thanks to Ian O'Phelan for the link/reminder.
• UPDATE: Never Mind the Pussycat - The Ornithological Art of Edward Lear exhibition site (2008) at Cornell University.
  
• UPDATE 2: Taschen recently published a facsimile edition of 'The Parrots' with removable/frameable prints.
• UPDATE 3: The size of each of the images in this post was increased by about 50% in Sept 2011.
• UPDATE 4: See Lear's Parrots - The Prequel featuring preliminary sketches and lithographs by Lear in preparing for his great book.
  

Military Caricatures

'Journal de l'Empire ou des Débats - Suivant les Evènements'

Hand-colored engraved caricature; figure of man with ass's ears dressed half in uniform and livery of the Empire and half in Restoration uniform and Scottish kilt.
Artist and publisher unknown; published in Paris in ~1815.

'Noddle Island, or How we are decieved' (sic)

Hand-coloured engraving caricature; woman with enormous headdress containing forts, soldiers, ships, flags, etc.
S.T (artist), Mary Darley (London publisher); 1776.
(Noddle Island - East Boston - was the site of the 2nd battle of the American Revolution and the first in which American artillery was used. [source])

'Contrasts Pl. 1st - Ancient and Modern Lancers'

Hand coloured etched caricature (by and after Heath);
William Heath (artist), Thomas McLean (publisher); ~1830 to 1834.

'A Russe'

Hand coloured etched caricature; giant head of Turk at left, biting off coat-tails of Russian officer fleeing at right.
William Heath (artist), Thomas McLean (publisher); 1828.
[Russo-Turkish War, 1828-1829*]

'An Allegory'

Hand colored etched caricature; uniformed figure of Russian tsar astride eagle which is depositing cage over turkey at left.
William Heath(artist), Thomas McLean (publisher); 1828.
[Russo-Turkish War, 1828-1829*]

'Chacun son Tour, ou la Fin du Roman'

Hand-colored engraved caricature; allegorical figure and soldiers, outdoors, with large candle-snuffers, eagle flying above; evidently pro-Bonapartist.
Notes: Honneur et Patrie. Constitutionelle. Maison Militaire du Roi. Guardes du Corps, Mousquetaires, Cent Suisses. Ordonnance Royale sur les Processions donnée la 20 cme année du notre règne. Censure pour la liberté de la presse. Ordre de St. Michel. Ordre Militaire de St. Louis. Décoration du Lys.
Artist unknown; dated ~1815.

'Coalition de 1806 - La Grande Armée* Agrandit Bien des Nez'

Hand-colored engraved caricature; French soldier at right pulling elongated nosed of figures of England, Sweden, Russia and Prussia at left.
Notes: George III. Voleur et assaissin sur mer, pousse contre la France les Rois coalisés, il s'éfforce mais vainement de relever ce pauvre Frie. Guillaume 3. Roi de Prusse dont la situation seroit digne de pitié si elle n'étoit aussi bein méritée. Les griffes ou serres de vautour données à Georges indiquent sa rapacité et la queue de dindon annonce sa betise.
Artist unknown, JJ Rousseau (publisher); undated but ~1806 to 1810.

'Congress of Vienna'*

Hand-coloured unsigned engraving caricature; rulers toasting each other before map of Europe, figures of numerous kings, officers, Jewish money-lenders etc. at right, victorious and overpowered heraldic eagles and beasts, arms etc. above and below.
H Delius (artist), Hermes Wilhelm (publisher); ~1815.

'Zemévid Europy vpátém desetili Devatenáctého Véku Landkarte
von Europa im fünften Decenium des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts'

Partially coloured lithographic humorous map of middle and southern Europe, with many small caricature military figures.
Artist unkown, Fr. Síra (publisher); ~1850.

'Dal Braccio Vostro Almi Sovrani Attende Italia Assassinata'

Hand-coloured engraving caricature; Bonaparte and cohorts laden with loot etc. walking into jaws of hell at right, Italy pleading before throne of Britain and allies at left.
Artist and publisher unknown. Published in Milan in 1799.

'Effusions of a Pot of Porter, or Ministerial Conjurations for Supporting the War'

Hand coloured aquatint caricature; tankard of ale foaming over on top of barrel, mounted figure above, seen from rear, summoning evil winds and storms.
James Gillray (artist), H Humphrey (publisher); 1799.

'General Jackson Slaying the Many Headed Monster'

Lithographic cartoon; Andrew Jackson, van Buren and assisting personage in uniform battling with serpent with numerous caricature heads.
Artist unknown, Henry R Robinson (publisher); 1833.

'Quadrille - Evening Fashions - Dedicated to the Heads of the Nation - La Poule'

Hand-coloured engraved caricature; ladies and gentlemen (1 in hussar uniform) dancing, all with exaggerated hair styles.
William Heath (artist), Thomas McLean (publisher); 1827.

'Military Dandyism, or A Specimen of Hungarian Taste..'

Hand coloured engraved caricature; full-length figure in very exaggerated lancer uniform and headgear with profuse embroidery, enormous epaulettes and plume, etc.
Artist and publisher uknown; published in ~1815 to 1820.

'Promenade au Palais Royal'

Coloured line and stipple-engraved caricature; 3 very corpulent personages, one in uniform, walking together.
'G' (artist), publisher unknown; ~1814.

'The Republican Soldier'

Hand-coloured etched caricature; stout soldier in [French] Revolutionary military uniform, laden with numerous weapons.
Notes: "Inflammetory [sic] harrangues to stir up the people to acts of sedition. Mutiny. Treason. Rebellion" ; "Hedd [sic] quarters. Craven anchor [crossed out]. Crown & anchor. Parole reform. Countersign--anarchy" ; ""Remonstrance from my constituents for non-attendance" ; "Fire is the best weapon you can use" ; "Sinew of rebellion"
Artist and publisher unknown; published in 1798.

'What are you staring at, eh? Did you never see a Grenadier before?'

Etched caricature; figure of Grenadier Guards drummer with enormous busby.
Artist and publisher unknown; published in 1830.

' "Who said rats!" 12th Lancer'

Original watercolor caricature on olive paper signed by T. George; uniform figure in profile striding toward right.
T George (artist); produced in 1894.



Prints, Drawings & Watercolors from the Anne SK Brown Military Collection [Brown University Library Center for Digital Initiatives].
(The images above - some background cleaned - are a sampling from the >700 results from searching on 'caricature')

This is a seriously enormous and exemplary collection and you can spend hours browsing. The images can be seen with a non-flash zoom viewer or modestly large versions can be downloaded.

"This ambitious multi-year endeavor will digitize the 15,000 individual prints, drawings, and watercolors from The Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection. The artwork vividly documents all aspects of military and naval history, with emphasis on the history and illustration of world military and naval uniforms from the 17th century to the present. In addition to the material on military and naval dress, this digital collection includes portraiture, caricatures, wartime posters, original photographs, and graphics on military and naval history in general, campaigns and battles, the arts and tactics of warfare, drills and regulations. There is a vast amount of material pertaining to military decorations and insignia, heraldic ornaments, armor, weaponry, equitation, flags, knightly orders, court and ceremonial dress, architecture, and the general history of costume. [...]

The prints, drawings, and watercolors are a significant part of The Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, the foremost American collection devoted to the history and iconography of soldiers and soldiering, and one of the world’s largest collections devoted to the study of military and naval uniforms. It was formed over a period of forty years by the late Mrs. John Nicholas Brown (1906-1985) of Providence and is still growing. Anne Seddon Kinsolving Brown began collecting in 1930 with the purchase of miniature lead soldiers manufactured in Europe and Great Britain. By 1950 her interest had shifted to other areas of militaria, chiefly the iconography of uniforms. Armies have traditionally been the focus of much satire and depictions of soldiers, particularly their uniforms, provide valuable information to the student of military dress. Mrs. Brown was no exception. She acquired large numbers of caricatures from all periods and countries including many original drawings and watercolors."

Exotic Moths

• Plates from 'Exotic Moths' by James Duncan, 1843 at NYPL. About half the illustrations are shown and all the images, except for the first, are displayed at full size. ['Exotic Moths' was Vol. XXXVII of 'The Naturalist's Library' (Vol. VII Entomology)]
• Previously: The Marshal Insect Album; In a Manner Lepidopterus; {Science}.
• Via Armchair Aquarium - great to see them resume after a long hiatus.

Panorama Handbills

La Nature à Coup d' Oeil

or

Accidentally Anamorphic

"The panorama aspired not to artistic stance or synthesis, but to an encyclopedic gaze midway between that of some aeronautic insect and that of a real-estate sales agent." [RA Potter]

Battle of Trafalgar

The Plan, No. 1, of the English Fleet bearing down on the Enemy's lIne, was given on-board the Victory. The Plan, No. 2, was made by Admiral Villeneuve's Captain (Migendie), and given by Mr. Toby on-board the Euryalus.

Henry Aston Barker, as Proprietor of the Panorama, Leicester-Square, takes the Liberty of informing the Public, that the various Views, and other Subjects which have been exhibited in it, were taken by him, and painted under his sole Management, during the Life of his Father. He therefore hopes, that the same Attention to give Satisfaction, by strict and faithful Representation, will entitle him to a Continuance of that Patronage with which the Panorama has for so many Years been honoured.
Open from Ten till Dusk - Admittance to each Painting, One Shilling - NB. A Person always attends to explain the Painting. J. Adlard, Printer, Duke Street, Smithfield.

A Grand & Interesting Exhibition of a Moving Panorama of Trafalgar.
Representing the Splendid Victory achieved by Lord Nelson.

Lord Nelsons' [1798] Defeat of the French at the Nile [1799]





View of the City of St. Petersburgh, taken on the Tower of the Observatory.
A View of the Attack upon Algiers is also exhibiting. Open from Ten till Dusk. [1818]

The River Neva, in its course through St. Petersburgh, is divided into two Branches, by the Island of Vassiliostroff, on which are the Exchange, the Colleges of Commerce, Academy of Sciences, seen on the right, when facing the Imperial Dock Yard, and the Museum, seen on the left, in the fore-ground. The Observatory is in the centre of the Range of Buildings, but is not seen in the Panorama, being under the Spectator.




Explanation of a Grand View of La Valetta, the capital of Malta, Taken from the Conservatory, and painted upon 19,000 Square Feet of Canvas, by Henry Ashton Barker, now Exhibiting in the Great Rotunda of the Panorama, Leicester Square. The Upper Circle contains an interesting view of the Siege of Flushing, the Town in Flames &c.
Open from Ten till Dusk. Admittance to each 1s. Adlard, Printer, Duke Street, Smithfield.
Books descriptive of Malta to be had at the Panorama, price Sixpence.

Explanation of the View of Gibraltar and Bay
(?)Taken from the Battery, called the Devil's Tongue

Mr Barker, Inventor and Proprietor of the Panorama, Leicester-Square, has no connection with any other Panorama or Painting in London. [1805]

The Tower Circle of Observation [.?.]
A View of Constantinople, and the Surrounding Country
[..?..]
A View of Ramsgate is now [.?.] in the Upper Circle [1801]

Description of the Representation of the Battle of Paris, Fought on the 30th March, 1814.
The View was taken on the Butte St. Chaumont, the Heights on which the Treaty of Chaumont was signed.
The Large Circle Contains a View of the Island of Elba. [1815]

Panorama de Londres
{bilingual legend}

Panorama of London from Westminster to the Tower in a fan-shape, after the panaorama of Thomas Girtin. 1803 - Print made by François Louis Thomas Francia.
(nothing to do with the Panorama, save for subject/style)








Colour and B&W version of 'Section of the Rotunda, Leicester Square' IN: 'Plans, and Views in Perspective' by Robert Mitchell 1801. (Mitchell was the architect responsible for building the rotunda)





London from St Paul's Cathedral as if viewed through a camera obscura; with a view of St Paul's Cathedral in the centre. 1845.
(again, the print is not directly related to the Panorama of Leicester Square)





Cyclorama, taken from the Frauenkirche in Dresden. Engraving by Karl August Richter, 1824.
(and again: not related to the Panorama)

'Along the River During the Qingming Festival' (scrolls right to left)
18th century remake of a 12th century scroll painting by Zhang Zeduan.

This Chinese panorama painting "captures the daily life of people from the Song period at the capital Bianjing, today's Kaifeng. The theme celebrates the festive spirit and worldly commotion on the Qingming Festival, rather than the holiday's ceremonial aspects such as tomb sweeping and prayers. The entire piece was painted in handscroll format, and the content reveals the lifestyle of all levels of the society from rich to poor as well as different economic activities in rural areas and the city." [source]

Now THAT'S a panorama!

-----------------

Anamorphosis (a. anamorphic) refers to the ingenious artistic technique of distorting the perspective of a picture when viewed from the normal reference point or angle. The apparent distortion disappears and a regular image emerges when the angle of viewing is changed or the image is observed using a curved mirror. Holbein's 'The Ambassadors'* is probably the most famous example of the mirror type. See: one, two. Some of the panorama flyers exhibit the phenomenon in the way the buildings are distorted and curved to conform to the curvature of the horizon/earth.

-----------------

The story goes that the Irish painter, Robert Aston Barker (1739-1806), was sketching the city of Edinburgh from Carlton Hill* in 1787 when he came up with the idea of reproducing the scene as a painting on a huge canvas that could be hung all the way around the inside of a large cylindrical container. The idea was for an observer in the centre to be encircled by a view without the perception boundaries of a regular painting's frame. In this way, he hoped to have the painted scene completely fill an observer's field of vision, making the experience as close to 'real' as possible. It would become the first immersive virtual reality.

Barker obtained a patent for his design in 1787, which he called 'La Nature à Coup d'Oeil' (nature at a glance). A purpose-specific building (rotunda), based on Barker's plans, was opened in Leicester Square in London in 1793 to great acclaim (two identical cross-section schematic images can be seen above). By this time, either Barker or a friend of his coined the term panorama ('all view') which would be applied both to the circular painting and to the structure in which it was hung.

The Leicester Square rotunda was 11 metres high and 26 metres in diameter and was configured so to allow the simultaneous display of two panoramas, one upstairs, one below. Traditional subject matter consisted of panoramic city views, land and sea battles, together with exotic location scenes (views of Athens and the Arctic region would prove to be the most popular). Visitors were admitted through a dark passage to heighten the sensation of entering another world. The umbrella roof allowed the panorama paintings to be lit by natural light entering from directly above each painted canvas. Shadows cast by visitors angled towards the centre of the structure so they didn't fall on the painting and break the illusion. In the sea battle panoramas, the viewing platform was sometimes made to resemble the deck of a ship. The upper and lower limits of the visual field were draped to make the vista appear endless.

The combination of art and technical innovation was a very popular spectacle. Visitors were astonished and sometimes disorientated by the panorama and the inability to get a proper perspective:

“[It] was so designed that two of the forces which militate against perfect illusion in a gallery painting—the limiting frame and standards of size and distance external to the picture itself—were eliminated…The intrusive elements of the spectator’s surroundings being blacked out, the world in which they were entwined consisted exclusively of the landscape or cityscape depicted on the canvas suspended thirty feet away.” [Richard Altick, 1978]

Exhibition spaces were opened in other cities, both in the UK and on the continent. The panorama paintings were of course portable, so after a season in London, they might be packed up and shipped to another venue. Other entrepreneurs set up competing ventures and introduced their own variations and the form ultimately became most popular in America, particularly during the 1840s-1850s, with the adopted name of cyclorama.

The Barker Panorama had handbills and programs printed which, for about the first fifteen years at least, provided an illustrated legend or key - as we see above - that unintentionally resembled an anamorphic image. Originally they simply wanted to give some sense of the 360-degree novelty of the exhibition and this necessitated presenting the subject matter in distorted perspective. There was an obvious emphasis on promoting the sensational aspects of a new form of visual entertainment, despite the fact that the keys were difficult to read and had no clear starting point.

Eventually, as the novelty of the spectacle wore off and/or became very widely known, the panorama legends were modified and displayed as two rectangles, without distortion, and could be more easily followed and read from left to right. This development coincided with a change in emphasis from the visual illusion aspect to the presentation of geographical accuracy. Barker (and subsequent entrepreneurs) had always highlighted the difficulties and extremes of conditions faced by the sketch artist to bring each panorama to the public. Extravagant notices told of the insider assistance provided by foreign envoys, for example, in gaining unique and updated information and the latest changes to the skylines of target locations. There were some ten or more versions of the Constantinople panorama made over fifty years, each subsequent painting said to be more complete, more contemporary than its predecessor.

The rotunda in Leicester Square closed in 1863 and the entertainment form suffered its greatest decline in patronage with the advent of moving pictures. Still, panoramas - in one form or another - have never completely disappeared from the cultural repertoire available in many countries.

• Let me just say that I hate this post and all who sail in her. It took days to find all these images. It's probably equal in search difficulty to outfitting the Zoomorphic Calligraphy post. That's why we have non-handbill pictures here and also why the quality of some of the images is only so-so: I originally couldn't find enough material. So I had to walk away for a while.
• Particular thanks go to Jonathan Potter Maps who went to the trouble of scanning and providing a larger version of the Malta image than the one they have displayed at their site.
• Magic search terms are always logical and obvious after the fact. In this case "key to panorama" led to a huge and frustratingly wonderful database of images that was ultimately the source for about half of the images above: "The City of London Libraries and Guildhall Art Gallery is host to COLLAGE, an image database containing over 20,000 works of art from its collections." But all their images are instrusively watermarked (I've removed/reduced these in the pictures above).[search page]
• The Panorama Effect exhibition site from Newman Library at Baruch College, The City University of New York.
• Adventures in Cybersound from Dr R Naughton compiles excerpts and images from a lot of sites on panoramas.
• Well timed: "An American artist is to unveil a giant "E-Cyclorama" as part of an exhibition in the Edinburgh Art festival, which begins" on Thursday yesterday. (the short film is worth watching - the artist's name is Sanford Wurmfeld)
• 'Panorama's, Painted and Photographic' from Panorama Mesdag ("the oldest 19th century panorama in the world in its original site" - Holland)
  
• Panoramic paintings worldwide [links] ( from: International Panorama Conference)
• Panoramic painting.
• Life Before Television: Low-tech Magazine, March 2008.
• 'The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium', 1997 by Stephan Oetterman seems to be the modern authority on the subject (cited all over the place in ref. to panoramas) [good review by RA Potter]
• 'The Encyclopedia of Ephemera: A Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector, Curator, and Historian' by Rickards, Twyman &c, 2000. This looks to be a really good book (Amazon)
• 'The Orient on the Victorian' Stage By Edward Ziter, 2003.
• 'The Panorama' by Bernard Comment, 1999.
• 'Between the Virtual and the Actual: Robert Barker's Panorama of London and the Multiplication of the Real in late eighteenth-century London' IN: Romanticism on the Net (Issue 46) by Peter Otto, 2007.
• Via ME, following a recent reminder from PGA.