For the birds …

Another wonderful piece from Barrie Sheppard. Barrie writes: If you happen to be on the viewing platform opposite the shops at Point Lonsdale at about 8:00 am on a Tuesday morning, you will see Elaine James of Ocean Grove line up her menagerie of chooks on the backrest of one of the seats that overlook the ‘Rip’ at Port Phillip Heads.

I first met Elaine a couple of years ago when she had with her just the one companion. “Flapper” (third from the left in the photograph) sat on a café chair next to Elaine near me outside a local coffee shop, as calm and unruffled as a labrador dog. And when Elaine, after instructing Flapper to “stay”, left to retrieve something from her car parked opposite, Flapper, without stirring, waited for her to return.

Flapper was a stray, unclaimed hen that had wandered into Elaine’s garden back in 2011 to become her companion, accompanying her to coffee shops, the beach, her weight-lifting club, and other places she visited in her daily life. She now has eighteen of these trained companions, nine perched here. Seeing the colourful variety of her “menagerie” on that bench brought to mind Melchior d’Hondecoeter’s The poultry yard in the NGV Collection, and other representations of birds in NGV’s works.

Born in Utrecht in 1636, d’Hondecoeter was taught by his father, a painter of landscapes and  birds. The young d’Hondecoeter was also taught by his uncle, Jan Baptiste Weenix, a painter of dead-game still lifes and hunting scenes. d’Hondcoeter’s early pictures were of sea views and fish.  He also painted still life works containing dead game-birds, but he abandoned these subjects for live birds.

Jan Weenix, d’Hondecoeter’s uncle and teacher spent four years in Rome, which probably accounts for the Italianate landscape in the background of The poultry yard – for the Claudian elements of the treatment of the sky, the rock formations, small human figures and the architectural structure on which two of the birds are perched. His rich, vivid palette is thought to have been influenced by the flower painters of the time, especially Willem van Aelst.

d’Hondecoeter was the pre-eminent bird painter of his time, He was noted particularly for his acute observation of the appearance and behaviour of birds, giving them individual personalities and capturing their passions of joy, fear and anger. He is believed to have trained a cock to stand as a model in his studio, using a mahlstick to adjust the pose of its head and the position of its wings. In the 19^th century he attracted the nickname the “Raphael of Birds”! It was said that he conveyed the maternity of a hen as tenderly as did Raphael that of the Madonna!

There is little trace of the still life elements of d’Hondecoeter’s early career in his The poultry yard. Dramatic activity is there a-plenty. Consternation reigns. The clue to its cause, for the viewer, is in the title. “Poultry” is the word describing birds that are raised for the table, presuming that the English term “poultry” is an accurate translation of the term in the Dutch title. For the birds, themselves, the cause of their agitation is there, tangibly, in the broken jug handle lying on the ground in the left foreground, an object used to kill and dress birds for the table. It’s also a mememto mori for the birds.

The cock in the centre, the fighting cock to his left and the white hen on the sill are the most agitated. A second hen on the sill looks away; the gander looks at the cock puzzled; the nesting goose looks on, apparently unfazed, perhaps unaware of the significance of the jug handle The chicks, busily eating, are too young to comprehend that they are being raised and fattened for the table. One bird has taken off, apparently in fright. The silhouetted swift in free flight is a contrast to the fate of the birds in the yard.

Compositionally, the 18 birds and chicks in the yard are arranged at random, as realism demands; however four prominent white birds in triangular formation anchor the composition.

Birds, we know, feature in numerous works in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, though usually not as individual creatures with distinct personalities as in the d’Hondecoeter work. Rather, they contribute symbolically to the iconography of works; such as representations of peace, love, freedom, or menace. The dove, for example, in Joseph Wright’s The Synnot Children is suggestive of freedom, and possibly of the Holy Spirit, as doves do generally in Renaissance religious works. The black crows in Schenk’s Anguish threaten menace and create fear. And the blue peacock in Jacob Huysmanns Edward Henry Lee, 1st Earl of Lichfield and his wife Charlotte Fitzroy and Children, (1674) functions, in the context of other Catholic elements, as a symbol of resurrection; a white peacock would have symbolised Christ.

Swans appear in NGV works depicting the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan, the story of how Zeus in the form of a swan rapes the beautiful Greek princess, Leda, the progeny of the union being Polydeuces and Helen whose beauty led to the disastrous Trojan war.

In Sidney Nolan’s version, the swan, in colour and brushwork stridently modernist, is about to mount an apparently helpless but pliant Leda.

Marcantonio Franceschini, in his engraved version of the story, depicts the swan in the conventional, aggressive pose – his huge wings outstretched, his neck arched and beak open – though there is little that is aggressive about the beak, and Leda shows no fear. Rather than attempting to repel the swan, her hand rests on its breast, and her attempt at modesty is half-hearted. She looks at the viewer as if proud of being so chosen by the disguised god.

The Leda and the Swan myth has found expression in art other than the visual, as we might expect. The Irish poet W. B. Yeats used it in his sonnet ‘No second Troy‘:

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.                    

Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Helen of Troy, whose great beauty led to the Trojan War, is a metaphor for Maud Gonne, the ravishing, vibrant revolutionary for whom Yeats had an abiding, unrequited passion. Maud Gonne’s beauty, combined with her passionate activism was of a kind that Yeats saw as contributing to the violence and destruction wrought by the Easter Uprising of 1912, and the Irish Civil War of 1922-23 – for which the image of the Trojan war is metaphor. Unlike the Franceschini work, Yeats portrays the swan’s act as a violent rape, one that engendered Leda with power, though with respect to wisdom the implication is that it did not. For Yeats, Maud Gonne had the power of great beauty, but lacked wisdom.

Swans figure in Rupert Bunny’s symbolist work, Endormies (“Sleepers”). On the surface (pardon the pun) they appear as natural decorative elements in a tranquil scene. but, given the title – “Endormies” –  they can be read as symbols of a Ledean experience dreamt by the  reclining figure, albeit an apparently gentler one of love, not rape.

Julian Opie’s Triennial installation along St Kilda Road challenges the divide between the realistic representation of a bird as an individual with a personality as in d’Hondecoeter’s work, and the non-individuated representations such as the examples given above. Opie’s  stylised single-line, witty LED animated drawings of pigeons, gulls, ducks, swamp hens, and herons, evoke, remarkably, a sense of personality.

But despite Opie’s birds, and the symbolic representations depicted in the works considered above, nothing matches the realism of d’Hondecoeter’s lively, individuated “characters”. Nor Elaine’s actual birds, of course.