1: Painting Parrots with Horemans

[Click image for larger view.]

Peter Jakob Horemans
Kitchen Still Life with Woman and Parrot, 1760
Oil on canvas (dimensions unknown)
(Location unknown)

https://everydayartcritique.blogspot.com/2017/12/portrait-of-count-anton-lamberg.html

Parrots and birds often seem a bit fuzzy or shadow-shrouded or just-slightly-wrong in pre-photography paintings (excepting dead birds, which got painted a *lot* and were always accurate). One wonders if the problem was their specific type of movement, whether the artists had less occasion to see them in real life and so were less familiarized generally, if their smaller size made them difficult to execute while integrating them into the rest of the picture, and/or if birds were just uncooperative sitters.

In paintings like the above, where the goal is depiction of natural movement in a split-second of time (and where that goal is pretty well met), often the animal's pose would be accomplished by having e.g. the woman posed and painted first, and then a *dead* bird would actually be 'posed' as needed on a table or something, the artist would do a study of the bird, and then this study would be replicated at the right size in the painting. (Do note that I'm not saying that happened here, because I have no idea. I'd probably guess that though, because A] still life artists were the ones painting a *lot* of dead birds and the whole left side of this painting is still life, b] the pose would be difficult to get from a live parrot, c] the bird's feet don't seem connected with the shadow on the woman's shawl, and d] details like the muscles on the bird's back have been picked out, but the muscle movement doesn't *quite* make sense with the way the bird is perched...would make more sense if that was the side it was slumped onto horizontally. On the other hand, the other still life objects do some to have a slightly higher level of finish than the bird, so who knows!)

True story: I always thought I'd get a parrot when I grew up and became responsible enough to have one, but the death of my first parakeet (of natural old age, I'll have you know) traumatized me so badly that I've never been tempted to bird ownership again. Still love birds, but they're too tiny to die :(