Watch the birdie
My £5 bargain. The illustration is Plate 14 from the first of Thorburn’s four-volume opus and shows: top, the waxwing; left to right, second row, pied flycatcher, red-breasted flycatcher, pied flycatcher, spotted flycatcher and brown flycatcher; bottom, collared flycatcher and golden oriole the course of preparing what was then to be the standard work on British ornithology, titled Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Islands.
Lilford had already commissioned John Gerrard Keulemans (1842-1912) to illustrate his text, but the Dutch natural history artist fell ill during the process and it was feared no one had the necessary talent to step into the breach.
Lilford’s approach to Thorburn was to prove to be the artist’s big break.
Of the 421 plates in the book, 268 were entirely Thorburn’s work and when they first appeared in 1888, demand for the volume, which was available only on subscription, increased threefold.
The beautiful illustrations took 10 years to complete, but they were a marriage of art and scientific accuracy. Previously, artists had used stuffed birds as models. Thorburn’s knowledge enabled him to draw and paint pictures with incredible realism. Wide acclaim followed, as did numerous other commissions from leading naturalists of the day.
By then Thorburn had moved to London. He married Constance Mudie, daughter of the founder of the famous Mudie Lending Library, in 1898, and the couple had one son, Philip.
Word of Thorburn’s prowess in the field of natural history spread, and in 1898, aged 38, he became one of the youngest ever to be elected a Fellow of the Zoological Society.
In 1902, Thorburn and his wife moved to live in the Surrey village of Hascombe, an idyllic retreat where he was able to study and paint his birds and other wildlife. He is said to have refused to have electricity in the house because of his preference for painting under natural light.
Each year he returned to his native Scotland where he filled sketchbooks with pencil studies taken from life. These acted later as working drawings for his major compositions, combining sketches made on several different occasions, and with entirely different backgrounds.
Thorburn’s earliest pictures show a restrained and painstaking approach, the detail of plumage or foliage executed with tedious precision. Later works are notable for their more free-flowing approach, the artist’s confidence apparent by his more generalised backgrounds and bold use of highlights and shadows.
Thorburn also tackled much larger compositions of stags, red deer, squirrels, foxes and dogs, invariably in Highland landscapes, but he was happiest painting and sketching birds.
He was a member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds for many years and was elected vice-president in 1927 in recognition of his services on behalf of bird preservation.
Despite illustrating the work of several other naturalists, notably for Lord Lilford and Augustus Grimble, William Beebe and J.G. Millais in the period 1902-13, it was not until 1915 that Thorburn’s own four-volume British Birds was published. It was an instant success, the large paper edition of 105 copies selling out before publication.
This was followed, among others, by A Naturalist’s Sketch-Book (1919); British Mammals (1920) and Game Birds and Wild Fowl of Great Britain and Ireland (1923).
He died at his home in 1935 after a long period of ill health. The last picture he painted was for the RSPB’s Christmas card that year. It showed a delicate goldcrest, completed while lying in bed, shrugging off the pain from his illness.
Thorburn was a productive artist and there is no shortage of pictures by him on the market. They range in value from the high hundreds to an average of £10,000-£15,000. Books from collectors’ fairs come cheaper.