Rex Brasher painted more birds than Audubon, and wasn't an enslaver; his art says, 'We could learn a lot from birds'

Brasher’s hand-colored print of screech owls (Rex Brasher Association)

Bird-art lovers who would like to elevate someone other than John James Audubon to the pedestal of America's best-known bird artist should look at the works of Rex Brasher, "the greatest bird artist you've never heard of," writes Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post. "Born in 1869, Brasher left an enormous body of paintings, almost 900 large-scale watercolors documenting American bird life and habitat, that became the source material for a monumental 12-volume compendium of hand-colored reproductions published as Birds & Trees of North America. . . . He penned a hand-illustrated autobiographical account of his early forays by sailboat to document waterfowl from New England to Florida."

Brasher was "a modest man who lived much of his life off the grid, which may be one reason he isn't more famous," Kennicott adds. "But his life's project to document American birds, an effort to outdo Audubon that began in the 1890s and continued into the 1920s, was celebrated in its day, with an exhibition at the Explorers Hall of the National Geographic Society in 1938. . . . But Brasher was very much a man of the 19th century. Despite periodic efforts to revive his work, his legacy — closely observed, naturalistic renderings of animal life — still suffers from having been out of step with the avant-garde and experimental art of the 20th century."

A hand-colored print of tree sparrows by Brasher (RBA image)

Brasher's art, once rediscovered, may enjoy renewed prominence in the bird-art world. "The Connecticut State Museum of Natural History, which owns some 800 of the original watercolors, is planning to make them more accessible to the public with exhibitions in a new building," Kennicott writes. "The efforts of the Rex Brasher Association include digitizing and publicizing his work. . . . And a new urgency about the fragility of the natural world may make people today more sympathetic to rediscovering his legacy. . . . Brasher may also benefit from growing awareness that Audubon, to whom he was often compared, was a complicated, often odious figure. . . . He was an enslaver and deeply contemptuous of the abolitionist movement."

Much like each man's character, there is a distinct spirit to how Brasher and Audubon present their bird renderings. "The difference between the artists' work is like the difference between a grand aristocratic portrait and a psychologically nuanced character sketch," Kennicott adds. "Audubon gets the dress and regalia right

Brasher with a sketchbook (RBA)

, and his birds project a powerful, self-fashioning sense of their own presence and importance. Brasher's birds live contentedly in their own world and don't need to perform or impress the viewer. If Brasher sometimes tends to moralize when he writes about birds, it isn't Aesopian. The moral is almost always the same: We could learn a lot from birds."

"The art world is more capacious today and less interested in perpetuating the hierarchical distinctions that award lower status to subcategories of representation, such as bird art," Kennicott opines. "Brasher's love of birds, articulated in his writing and manifest in his painting, speaks with fresh vigor to anyone who believes that an essential part of art is looking, studying and seeing fine distinctions in the world. Perhaps he was motivated to outdo Audubon's work as a naturalist. But if birds had a say in this, they would almost certainly prefer Brasher."