Page:Condor15(2).djvu/23

 Mar., 1913 ALLAN BROOKS---AN APPRECIATION 73 It is always to laugh how promptly the casual bird-student criticises a bird- painting, especially if it is a bit unusual. It is trebly amusing if the artist is by, for he is able to sustain his position by exact citations and conclusive examples. The average bird-'student finds that he is psychologically inaccurate in his ob- servations, and his flimsy defenses go down under the merciless fire of question to which Brooks subjects his pretensions--not, indeed, to confuse the student, nor to justify Brooks, but to develop the truth. Fidelity to nature is instinctive with Brooks, but accuracy of drawing is as sedulously cultivated as are scales and appogiatura by a prima donna. It is basal. Much of his work w11 bear the microscope and all of it the telescope. Work which will bear both is rare, indeed, but painstaking accuracy of detail is united with depth, roundness, and life-like appearance, to a unique degree in the work of this artist. Perhaps his chief distinction is a feeling for plumage. Brooks's birds are clad in feathers; fluffyl dainty, firnbriated feathers, which you would like to towsle in your fingers for the sake of seeing them fall back into place with almost sentient precision. We have all of us seen the other sort--coats of mail, or scales, and we hail with delight a man who feels a bird's definitive mark, feathers. Naturalness and repose also characterize all of this self-taught artist.'s work. His birds are not doing stunts after the discarded fashion of Audubon, but they have the imperishable quality of repose, and this whether at rest or in action. There are bird portraits in the older style which fill you with a sense of disquiet. You want to quit their presence after a momentary glimpse, but you cannot so easi- ly be rid of them. Their manifest discomfort haunts you forever after, and as often as you recall their strained attitudes, you are distressed. Not so with a Brooks. Be the bird flying, climbing, or standing, he is balanced. He can abide your absence, and you will return for another view as to the sight of a beloved pool. Softness is another characteristic of Brooks's work, and it shows not only in his matchless feathers, but in his charming backgrounds. Brooks hates' to do backgrounds with his birds, because he contends that we cannot see birds and scenery at the same time. And of course he is right. If the eye focuses on a bird, the scene goes out. But we have to compromise here. We can get enough fuzzy backgrounds with the camera. What we want to see, often enough at least, is the bird in his setting, even if we do violence to nature. What we get is really symbolism; and Brooks handles his backgrounds with so delicate a touch that we get the sense of the bird in his surroundings even if we have to admit, upon analysis, that the bird itself is too large or too well defined to pass for a photograph. Bird paintings are for the most part necessarily illustrations, and as such they have abiding values. We want to get our friends at close range, arrayed in their best, and we want to see them with definitive distinctness in a clear light, together with such an investiture of appropriate surroundings as may be thrown about them. Bird "pictures" in the strict sense are possible only in the case of the larger species, where the subjects may be placed at a sufficient distance to be brought into focus along' with trees and fields and mountains. They must ap- pear, namely, beyond the hundred-foot, or universal focus, distance. The only exception possible to this rule is in the selection of appropriate floral or local setting, pitched to the same scale of magnitude as the subject. But this is not a critique on art, only a plea for honest judgment and discrimination in a fiel'd which has its confessed limitations, its impassable boundaries. Beyond this realm Brooks can pass, and does pass in his delineation of big game; but he carries with him still, truth to tell, something of the spirit of his