Brasher's Birds

Rex Brasher (pronounced Bray-sher) inherited a tremendous ambition from his father, a Wall Street broker and amateur ornithologist who had known the great John James Audubon, had thought his work incomplete and inaccurate, had urged young Rex to paint all the birds of the U. S. and paint them better. Obediently, after years of spare-time study, Rex bought a sailboat for $600, coasted from Maine to Florida, piercing inlets, foraging ashore for all the birds he could find. And later, on $10,000 race-track winnings, he traveled the continent for three years-- everywhere sketching. With the whole West open, as it had not been to Audubon. and with such latter-day research as Dr. Elliott Coues's massive check list and American Museum of Natural History's 100,000 bird skins, Brasher achieved at least part of his ambition to outdo Audubon: he painted twice as many birds.

Professional ornithologists and professional bird painters have been inclined to look down their noses at his work. They point out his anatomical inaccuracies: his horned owl represented with three rather than two toes forward. They criticize his romantic cloud effects. They pointedly praise the correctness of his contemporaries, men primarily ornithologists like American Museum's Francis Lee Jaques. British Columbia's crack rifle shot Major Allan Brooks, Audubon Societies' youthful Roger Tory Peterson (Field Guide to the Birds), and the late brilliant Louis Agassiz Fuertes. But sportsmen and some collectors like the easy naturalism of Brasher's duck pictures, the spirit of his long-shanked road runner, the dash of his bald eagle. Accordingly, not many bird societies and libraries, but rather sportsmen and dilettantes -- like Airplane Manufacturer William Edward Boeing, Cereal Manufacturer W. K. Kellogg, Author Paul de Kruif--have bought 84 complete sets of Brasher (874 pictures of 1,200 species and subspecies). Audubon, during his lifetime, had sold 1,200 sets of his two editions.

That Brasher's original paintings might be together forever, he and Nephew Philip, the artist's business aid, negotiated an agreement with Connecticut's State Park & Forest Commission in 1934: Brasher would give his paintings; the State would within two years build a wheel-shaped gallery for them in Kent Falls State Park. Month ago, the museum not having been built according to the agreement, Philip Brasher drove to Hartford, declared the paintings forfeit to the artist. Few days later he & wife trundled them down to Washington, where this week, in the National Geographic's large bright 16th Street Building, the first complete show of Rex Brasher's work opened.

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