Richard Collins: Resourceful and intelligent rooks celebrated in watercolour
Detail from Mildred Anne Butler, Shades of Evening, 1904. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland
Two handsome rooks greet you at the entrance to a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland. Loaned by the Natural History Museum, the mounted pair guard a collection of large-scale watercolours by a painter who had a soft spot for these birds.
Mildred Anne Butler was born in 1858 at Kilmurry House near Thomastown County Kilkenny. Apart from visits to London Paris and Cornwall, she lived her entire life in this 18th-century Palladian mansion, with its fields, woods, and a large pond. Not having to earn a living, she began painting rural scenes. Cattle, steam-powered threshing machines, and doves, were among her subjects.
Of the 17 pictures on show at the Gallery, five depict rooks. Another features a magpie strung up as a scarecrow ‘pour encourager les autres’. Andrew Wyeth, in his Study for a Woodshed, would embrace that ghoulish theme in the 1940s.
Crows, especially ravens, appear widely in Western art. A magpie is forced into respectful silence in Piero della Francesca’s Nativity. Van Gogh’s ominous Wheatfield with Crows is a cultural icon. A young woman hugs a crow in a Picasso Blue Period picture. Oliver Shephard’s Cúchulainn bronze includes the raven, while Vincent Sheridan celebrates corvids in his work.
Butler kept stuffed specimens to ensure that her depictions were anatomically correct. Its distinctive profile makes the rook an ideal artist’s model. The shaggy plumage, long nose-like bill and trousers-covered ‘knees’, give it an uncanny human resemblance. She sets the black plumage against the pale mauve winter light of the Irish countryside. Her evocative Shades of Evening is an atmospheric masterpiece.
Rooks are the most ‘human’ of our birds. Feeding and roosting in flocks, they nest communally in tree-top ‘rookeries’, avian villages. Lively and quarrelsome, they chatter noisily, each trying to outdo its neighbour in a hierarchical rat-race. Lovable rogues, these 'neighbours from hell', who may steal nesting materials when owners’ backs are turned, are, to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘human, all too human.’
Each bird species has its own unique ‘personality’. Having captured and ringed rooks for more than 30 years, I think I know their character fairly well. Perhaps it’s a figment of my imagination, but Butler seems to capture that essence perfectly. With their quasi-binocular vision, rooks seem to gaze knowingly into our souls. Resourceful and intelligent, their lifestyles uncannily resemble ours. Am I indulging in sentimental anthropomorphism? Yes, guilty as charged! But this is art, not science.
Butler knew some of the impressionists. Like them, she painted ‘en plein air’ — an unusual practice in her day. But she didn’t follow them down the fleeting impressionistic road. Instead, she turned to moral and traditional themes, even offering an avian version of David’s The Oath of the Horatii. "And straight against that great array went forth the dauntless three" wrote Thomas Babington Macaulay. Her Green-eyed Jealousy’ references Shakespeare’s .
Our Mildred had a sense of humour. Crows, in their funereal attire, parody pompous lawyers in her High Court of Justice. A snowy avian procession caricatures the opening of Parliament.
The curator of the exhibition is Niamh MacNally.
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