ART THAT WAS RIGHT ON THE MONEY
Work included the painted birds on back of Canadian currency in ’80s and ’90s
John Crosby was best known for painting the art in Canada’s bible of all bird books, but if you’re older than 25 you have also carried his paintings in your wallet.
Crosby painted the birds on the back of Canadian currency in the 1980s and ’90s — two robins on the $2 bills, a kingfisher on the $5 bill, an osprey on the $10 bill, common loon on the $20 and on eventually to the pine grosbeak on the $1,000 note. Tens of millions of people owned his paintings, which, unlike most art, survived careless stuffing into pockets and even trips through washing machines.
But his more serious painting, the art that scholars still consult, is The Birds of Canada, the authoritative work from 1966 detailing all birds in this country.
Crosby, who died Monday at the age of 91, supplied all the colour art and was the last survivor of the three men who produced that book. The others were Earl Godfrey (the author) and Stewart MacDonald (who contributed the black-and-white drawings).
Crosby was also generous with his time and taught a younger generation not just to identify birds, but to see and understand them.
Dan Brunton, an Ottawa naturalist and environmental consultant, tells of a walk in the woods with Crosby decades ago when Brunton was just starting out and Crosby was an established authority.
They found a fox sparrow in the Britannia woods, and Brunton was happy that he had identified it correctly with the expert watching.
“Being a typical birder, however, I just ticked it off (his list) and started to move on,” he said via email.
“Not John. He stayed put, training his scope on the bird and studying it for what must have been 10 minutes. I was floored: I figured there wasn’t much about how a Canadian fox sparrow moved or looked that John wouldn’t have known already — wasn’t he literally writing the book on them, after all? — but he wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to learn more. I’ve never forgotten that lesson in what true appreciation of wildlife is all about. And his fox sparrow in Birds of Canada is terrific!”
Crosby’s most popular works — the pieces that were reproduced most often — never brought him much public recognition.
The Birds of Canada banknote series was introduced in 1986 and was the first series not to have a $1 bill. The bills were finally replaced after 2000 by banknotes with better anti-counterfeiting measures, a change completed in 2004 when the $20 loon note finally went out of production. There isn’t much room for landscape on these notes, but each painting shows the bird in its habitat.
Crosby also painted for Canadian stamps, but they didn’t feature birds. His two-cent stamp in 1953 portrayed a polar bear, and his five-cent stamp in the ’60s showed a narwhal.
In 2005, the Society of Canadian Ornithologists gave him the Doris Huestis Speirs Award for contributions to ornithology. He wasn’t a trained ornithologist in the strict sense, they noted, but, given his achievements, this didn’t matter.
Crosby was born in Toronto in 1925. He studied forestry but soon found that his real interest was illustrating birdlife. He studied birds in the wild and at the Royal Ontario Museum, and in 1951 he joined the National Museum of Canada (now the Canadian Museum of Nature) as an artist-naturalist. Visitors who examined the dioramas were looking, in part, at his work.
Crosby, Godfrey and MacDonald worked first in the main museum downtown and later in a museum building on Holly Lane, near Heron and Walkley roads, where they welcomed visits by the growing community of amateur birders in Ottawa in the 1970s.
“We had access to these three guys … Things have changed so much now,” said veteran Ottawa birder Bruce Di Labio. “You could just walk in and go up to the office” and chat.
“John was a very gentle individual, very kind, and loved to talk and share his knowledge,” he said.
Bird art of the day followed the style of guide books by Roger Tory Peterson and later others. Birds were painted in a two-dimensional way showing distinguishing marks, but the setting didn’t matter much. Crosby added the habitat and the feel of looking at a real bird acting the way each species does.
“The (Crosby) illustrations were more accurate, giving more life to them, not just these flat-looking images. He was underrated” — perhaps because he didn’t produce art for commercial books.
There will be a family funeral at a later date.