AFA Summer 2020

2020 Antiques & Fine Art 105 previous page John Singleton Copley (American, 1738–1815), Young Lady with a Bird and Dog, 1767. Oil on canvas, 48 x 39 ½ inches. Toledo Museum of Art; Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott (1950.306). In European cultural centers such as Paris in the 1700s, live or stuffed imported species of birds could be seen fairly readily by the public in aviaries and natural history collections, coffee houses, birdseller shops, and at fairs. The popularity of birds with colorful plumage or strange characteristics like fantastically long tails or feathered crests quickly translated to motifs for the decoration of wealthy households. The Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory employed painters who specialized in bird imagery and often used as sources the illustrated books on ornithology that proliferated during the second half of the century. These artists were not always concerned with depicting naturalistic birds, however. The lavish 368-piece dessert service ordered by Louis-René-Édouard, Cardinal Prince de Rohan, in 1771 was decorated with not only identifiable species of doves, pheasants, and other birds, but also with fanciful species with exotic features and unlikely colors, such as the birds on this monteith, a vessel from which glasses hung from their foot to be chilled by ice or cold water within. Monteith from the Prince de Rohan service, Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, painting attributed to Louis-Denis Armand (French, active 1745–88), Soft-paste porcelain, enamel and gilt, 1771–1772. 5⅛ x 117⁄16 inches. Toledo Museum of Art; Gift of Royce G. Martin in Memory of His Wife (1951.401). Boston painter John Singleton Copley’s 1767 portrait of a well-heeled little girl includes what appears to be a domesticated red-headed lovebird, a small parrot species. Keeping birds as pets—often local songbirds—was already well-established in both Europe and the American colonies. But as more and more European ships on missions of trade and exploration brought exotic birds like canaries and parrots back home, these species became increasingly common features of wealthy and even middle-class homes. Just a few years before Copley painted this canvas, British naturalist George Edwards (1694–1773) noted this intrinsic relationship between the increased commercial activity of Europeans in the wider world—particularly the trade in enslaved Africans—and the trade in non-European animals. He wrote in A Natural History of Uncommon Birds (1758– 1764) about the confusion around where the red-headed lovebird originated. Though the bird is endemic to Africa, some claimed it came from South America and others the East Indies, a misunderstanding Edwards explained as the bird being “generally brought to us by ships whose last departure was from America; for they who trade to Guiney rarely return directly from thence to Europe; but, in pursuance of their abominable and unnatural traffick in the human species, sail . . . to the American colonies....”