William Matthew Hart (British, 1830-1908), Oriole
Charles Lucien Bonaparte described Broderip's Oriole in 1850 and named it for William John Broderip (1789–1859), the London magistrate, conchologist, and founding member of the Zoological Society. It is now treated as a species of the Black-naped Oriole, Oriolus chinensis, confined to the Lesser Sunda Islands of Indonesia: Lombok, Sumbawa, Sumba, Flores, and Alor. It is a richly colored bird, deep golden yellow with a black band through the eye, black wings, and a pink bill, and it lives in forest and wooded country.
The Lesser Sundas fascinated Victorian naturalists. In 1856, on Lombok, Alfred Russel Wallace noticed the abrupt change in fauna between Bali and Lombok that later became known as the Wallace Line, the boundary between the Asian and Australian zoological regions, and his Malay Archipelago (1869) made the islands famous. Neither Gould nor Hart ever saw the bird alive; Gould drew his figure from a specimen in his own collection, “a richly coloured old male.”
A male oriole perches on a slender, flowering branch, its brilliant yellow body turned toward the viewer and its head in profile, showing the black eye band and the heavy pink bill. Above, broad green leaves and a spray of pale lilac flowers fill the upper part of the sheet, and further flowers hang below.
Gould published Oriolus broderipi in the second volume of The Birds of Asia, in Part 31, issued in 1878, by which time Hart was his principal artist. The inscription “Original Drawing W. H” in the lower right identifies the artist by his initials. Gould’s Asian orioles were among the most brilliantly colored subjects of that work, and Hart’s taste for saturated color suited them perfectly.
WILLIAM MATTHEW HART (BRITISH, 1830-1908)
The talented natural history painter William Matthew Hart was the artistic genius behind some of the lavish illustrations for John Gould’s splendid work The Birds of Great Britain and A Monograph of the Trochilidae or family of Hummingbirds.
He began working for Gould in 1851, beginning an association that was to last thirty years. Early during this period, he made the patterns for the lithographic plates for Gould’s work on hummingbirds and working on The Birds of Great Britain with Henry Constantine Richter. By 1870 Hart had become Gould’s chief artist and lithographer. After Gould died in 1881, Hart was employed by Richard Bowdler-Sharpe of the British Museum to complete Gould’s work on the birds of New Guinea and to produce illustrations for Sharpe’s monograph on the birds-of-paradise.
Hart is roundly regarded as Gould’s most devoted protegé and his most accomplished artist, drawing upon Gould’s incomparable legacy of research and craftsmanship to create a splendid tribute to Gould and his favorite birds.
Please feel free to contact us with questions by phone at 215.735.8811,
or by email at loricohen@aradergalleries.
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