{"product_id":"william-matthew-hart-british-1830-1908-quetzal","title":"William Matthew Hart (British, 1830-1908), Quetzal or Pharomacrus mocinno","description":"\u003cdiv style=\"text-align: center;\"\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWilliam Matthew Hart (British, 1830-1908)\u003cbr\u003e“Quetzal or Pharomacrus mocinno”\u003cbr\u003eFrom A Monograph of the Trogonidae, or Family of Trogons, Plate One.\u003cbr\u003eLondon: Richard and John E. Taylor, for the author, 1875.\u003cbr\u003eOriginal watercolor heightened with gum arabic on paper\u003cbr\u003eInscribed in pencil upper left by Gould “Plant Barkeria Elegans”, \u003cbr\u003eand possibly “William Matthew Hart”\u003cbr\u003eSheet size: 22 1\/2 x 15 in Frame size: 24 x 31 in\u003cbr\u003eProvenance: John Gould F.R.S. (1804-1881), and thence by descent to the present owner, their sale Christie’s South Kensington, 29th September, 2011, lot 31.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003eThis is the finished watercolor from which the opening plate of Gould’s revised monograph on the trogons was lithographed and colored, and it is the most ambitious composition in the entire work. Hart places a male quetzal at the mouth of a nesting cavity hollowed in a decaying trunk, his golden green train sweeping upward and doubling back across the upper right of the sheet in two great arcs. Within the darkness of the hollow, the female leans forward, her duller olive head and gray breast set against the shadow so that the male’s scarlet underparts read as the single burning note of the picture. Three further birds occupy the middle and far distance, perched on slender branches above a pale wash of cloud forest and tree fern, a device that allowed Gould to present the species in the round without resorting to a second plate.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003eWhat the eye reads as a tail is in fact a pair of enormously elongated uppertail coverts, and Hart is careful to show the true tail beneath them, its outer feathers white, in the birds seen at a distance. He also records the way the male folds the train back over his body as he enters the nest, a detail that field ornithologists would not describe in print for another half century. The foreground is carried by a spray of white orchids, a scatter of bracket fungi along the fallen limb, and the bleached, weathered stub of a broken branch at the right, all of them handled with a naturalist’s attention to decay as well as to display.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003eHart worked in transparent washes for the forest distance and the bark, then built the plumage in opaque bodycolor, drawing individual barbs with the point of the brush before glazing the greens and reds with gum arabic. The gum imparts a low, wet gloss that mimics iridescence and shifts as the sheet is turned toward the light. It is the same technique that made his hummingbird plates famous, and no hand-colored lithograph after this drawing can quite reproduce what he achieved in the original.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003eGould issued his first monograph on the trogons in three parts between 1835 and 1838, with thirty-six plates drawn largely by himself and his wife, Elizabeth, and lithographed with the assistance of Edward Lear. By the late 1850s, the family had been transformed by new collecting in Mexico and Central America, and Gould returned to the subject. The second edition, published in parts and completed in 1875, runs to forty-seven hand-colored plates. Gould regarded it not as a revision but as a new book: the text was rewritten, every plate redrawn, and eleven subjects added that had been unknown to science when the first edition appeared.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003eThe visual difference between the two editions is immediately apparent and is the reason collectors prize the later work. The plates of the 1830s isolate their birds against sparse foliage. Those of the second edition set them in fully realized habitats of tropical flora, epiphytes, fungi, and distant forest, with additional figures introduced to show sex, age, and behavior. That change of program was in large part the work of Hart, who by this date was the dominant artist on Gould’s plates, sharing the volume with H. C. Richter.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003eThe quetzal takes pride of place as the first plate. Gould had given the species the honor of a folding plate in the first edition, and returning it to the head of the sequence in a still grander composition was a deliberate statement about the bird and about the book.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003eGould’s accompanying letterpress, which retains his preferred spelling of the bird’s name, is among the most quoted passages he ever wrote:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"text-align: justify; line-height: 115%; margin: 0in .4in 9.0pt .4in;\"\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%;\"\u003eIt is scarcely possible for the imagination to conceive anything more rich and gorgeous than the golden-green colour which adorns the principal part of the plumage of this splendid bird, or more elegant and graceful than the flowering plumes which sweep pendant from the lower part of the back, forming a long train of metallic brilliancy. Nature appears to have ordained that birds possessing unusual brilliancy of plumage should be inhabitants of retired and obscure situations; and in strict conformity with this law the Quezal, by far the most beautiful of its tribe, is to be found in the most dense and gloomy forests, remote from the haunts of civilized man, which may, perhaps, account for its being so little known to Europeans until within the last few years; for although the long plumes were used to adorn the head-dresses of the ancient Mexicans, and at a later period were transmitted by the Spaniards from time to time to Europe, yet it is only very recently that we have become acquainted with the entire bird.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003eGould also registers the taxonomic question that was live as he wrote. Noting that birds from the southern part of the range carry narrower plumes, he records that on this character, chiefly, the population from Costa Rica and Veragua had been separated by Jean Cabanis as a distinct form. Cabanis’s bird survives as the southern subspecies, Pharomachrus mocinno costaricensis, distinguished from the northern race chiefly by the shorter, narrower train of the male, the two populations divided by the lowland gap that runs through southern Guatemala, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003eThe pencil inscription at the upper left is the most revealing thing on the sheet, because it is a working instruction rather than a title. Gould directed the botanical settings of his plates as closely as he directed the birds, and here he has named the plant he wanted his artist to supply. \u003ci\u003eBarkeria elegans\u003c\/i\u003e was described by Knowles and Westcott in 1838; the name is now treated as a synonym of \u003ci\u003eBarkeria uniflora\u003c\/i\u003e, a slender epiphytic orchid of central and southwestern Mexico with pale lilac to white flowers marked at the lip. The white orchids that fill the lower register of the composition answer that instruction.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003eSheets carrying such notes are the documentary core of Gould’s enterprise because they show the division of labor in his studio with unusual clarity, with the naturalist specifying subject, accessory, and setting, and the artist resolving the whole into a picture that the coloring workshop could then follow. Very few drawings from the \u003ci\u003eTrogonidae\u003c\/i\u003e survive with the instruction still legible.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003eWilliam Matthew Hart entered Gould’s employment in the summer of 1851 and remained associated with the enterprise, and with its successors, for the rest of his working life. His first significant responsibility was the making of pattern plates for the hummingbird monograph, the master impressions colored by hand to serve as the standard for the coloring workshop, which he heightened with the metallic pigments that give those plates their reputation. He worked alongside H. C. Richter on \u003ci\u003eThe Birds of Great Britain\u003c\/i\u003e, and by 1870, he had become Gould’s principal artist and lithographer while continuing to finish plates by hand. Maureen Lambourne, whose family connection to Gould gives her account of Hart as the chief artist of the later years, observes that his instinct for saturated color, sometimes carried past the point of accuracy, was ideally matched to the most brilliantly plumaged subjects.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003eAfter Gould’s death in 1881, Hart was retained by Richard Bowdler Sharpe, curator of birds at the British Museum, to complete the unfinished plates of \u003ci\u003eThe Birds of New Guinea\u003c\/i\u003e. Sharpe had been Gould’s protégé since boyhood, and he went on to enlarge that project into his own \u003ci\u003eMonograph of the Paradiseidae\u003c\/i\u003e, for which Hart supplied the original watercolors. Sitwell called the result the culmination of Gould’s life work, a judgment repeated in the trade ever since. Whatever the merits of that claim, it locates Hart correctly: he is the artist through whom Gould’s manner passed into the last generation of the great illustrated bird books.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003eThe resplendent quetzal was sacred to the Maya and to the peoples of central Mexico, its plumes reserved for the headdresses of rulers and priests and associated with the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl. It remains the national bird of Guatemala and gives its name to that country’s currency. The species occupies montane cloud forest from Chiapas in southern Mexico through Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua to western Panama, generally between about four thousand and ten thousand feet, and it nests, as Hart shows, in cavities in soft rotted wood, often old woodpecker holes, since its bill and feet are too weak to excavate sound timber.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"margin-bottom: 8.0pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 115%;\"\u003eThe bird that Gould could describe in 1875 as scarcely known to Europeans is now, in a modest and carefully managed way, among the most sought-after sights in Central America.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center;\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWILLIAM MATTHEW HART (BRITISH, 1830-1908)\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: left;\"\u003eThe 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHart 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: left;\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePlease feel free to contact us with questions by phone at 215.735.8811,\u003cbr\u003eor by email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:loricohen@aradergalleries.com\" target=\"_blank\"\u003eloricohen@aradergalleries.\u003cwbr\u003ecom\u003c\/wbr\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv style=\"text-align: center;\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Arader Galleries","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39330869936189,"sku":"","price":285000.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1208\/8894\/products\/hartwc_QuezalorPharomacrusmocinno.jpg?v=1622662756","url":"https:\/\/aradergalleries.com\/products\/william-matthew-hart-british-1830-1908-quetzal","provider":"Arader Galleries","version":"1.0","type":"link"}