Academic literature on the topic 'Wildlife painting, American'

Abstract British by birth Allan Cyril Brooks (1869-1946) emigrated to Canada in the 1880s, and became one of the most important North American bird illustrators during the first half of the twentieth century. Brooks was one of the leading ornithologists and wildlife collectors of the time; he corresponded extensively with other ornithologists and supplied specimens to many major North American museums. From the 1890s on he hoped to support himself by painting birds and mammals, but this was not possible in Canada at that time and he was forced to turn to American sources for illustration commissions. His work can be compared with that of his contemporary, the leading American bird painter Louis Agassiz Fuertes (1874–1927), and there are striking similarities and differences in their careers. This paper discusses the work of a talented, self-taught wildlife artist working in a North American milieu, his difficulties and successes in a newly developing field, and his quest for Canadian recognition.

A review of successful systems of wildlife conservation, the North American included, suggests that broad public support and determined effort by volunteers is essential for wildlife conservation. Since North American wildlife conservation is the only large-scale system of sustainable natural resource use, and exemplifies the great economic and cultural benefits of a renewable resource held in common, its lessons may be profitably applied to Rangifer conservation. Animals that have value are surrounded by myths that tell of their relationship to humans. In our Anglo-American culture reindeer and caribou are rather deficient in this respect. However, reindeer feature prominently in the rise of modern humans and the demise of Neanderthal man early in the Upper Paleolithic. The colonization by humans of the periglacial environments during the last glaciation depended on the rich periglacial megafauna, Rangifer included. Archeological sites of the European Upper Paleolithic show that reindeer were the most important food source. The Upper Paleolithic, characterized by exceptional physical development and health of people, as well as by the first flowering of art, extended from Spain to Crimea with surprisingly little cultural change for some 25 000 years. While the cave paintings express an infatuation with dangerous game (woolly mammoth, woolly rhino, steppe wisent, giant deer, cave lions, bears etc), the archeological sites indicate that reindeer was the staple food. Reindeer play a minor role in cave art. Neither this art, nor archeological sites, show any evidence of warfare. It is hypothesized that during a mid-glacial interstadial modern people entered Europe having developed a highly successful system of hunting reindeer using interception based on the discovery of chronologic time. This led to a first flowering of culture based on a rich economy, but also to additional hunting mortality of the periglacial mega-herbivores that Neanderthal people depended on. That would explain the slow decline into extinction of the previously invincible Neanderthal people. Therefore, modern humans owe much of what they are to reindeer. We need to reciprocate. What is urgently required is a foundation formed by volunteers for the conservation of caribou, similar to the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, focusing on the severely endangered wood¬land caribou.

Nikolaas Tinbergen was born in 1907 in The Hague. There must have been something very special about his family, for it produced two Nobel Prize Winners (Niko, in Medicine and his eldest brother in Economics), the Director of Energy in The Hague, another zoologist, who died just as a potentially distinguished career was unfolding, and a sister who became, like the father, a grammar school teacher. Certainly there had been primary and secondary school teachers on both sides of the family, with his father a teacher of Dutch language and history and a scholar of mediaeval Dutch. Perhaps more important, the Tinbergens were a warm and happy family, where each child was given loving encouragement to follow his or her own bent, coupled with the modicum of discipline necessary for the happiness of the whole. Tinbergen (in his Notes for the Royal Society) described the context of his boyhood thus: Our family was the natural centre of a wide circle of friends with greatly varied interests. We had the example of hardworking parents, who managed, before the days of many scholarships, to give all of us a University education. There was a tradition of interest in the arts, in nature and in politics. All my brothers and I had from our father the inclination and a certain ability to draw and paint; during our many happy holidays in the country we would all carry our sketching pads and spend hours sketching. Regular visits to theatre, concerts and art galleries ... But Niko’s interest in nature, already apparent when he was five years old, did not come primarily from family members: they enjoyed the open air, but they were more concerned with the arts and social problems. In an autobiographical article (Tinbergen (1985) to which this memoir is much indebted) he ascribes his fascination with wildlife to the general interest in nature which had been growing in The Netherlands since the late 19th century. There were newspaper articles and popular books on animal life, and, appealing to the collector in every child, excellent reproductions of the paintings of natural history subjects by 19th century artists were given away in biscuit packets. Elsewhere (Notes) he has mentioned the importance to him of the writings of Jac. P. Thijsse and ‘the now forgotten American author William Long’