In the beautiful mountains of Northwest Connecticut is the Sharon Audubon Center, where I often went to clear my bird brain by looking at birds. I was hooked on John J. Audubon’s illustrations of flying marvels he had painted over a century earlier, and I had always believed that Audubon was the sine qua non of naturalist artists. Well, this fall, Field Notes, the memo books that have been flying out of stores and into designers’ hands for years, proved me wrong. The limited-edition “Birds and Trees of North America” set features six beautiful birds painted by Rex Brasher (1869–1960), a new-to-me naturalist whose monumental compendium gives the edition its name. They are designed for birders, nature lovers and drawing fanciers of all kinds.
Brasher is, as The Washington Post recently wrote, the greatest nature painter you’ve probably never heard of. A self-taught artist and longtime resident of the Northwest Corner, at age 16 he made it his life’s work to paint every bird in North America—producing a 12-volume compendium in 1929–1933 featuring descriptions of nearly 1,300 species and subspecies, including 874 color prints. Unhappy with the quality of four-color printing at the time, Brasher had black-and-white versions of his paintings printed, and he then colored them himself with watercolor, totaling 87,400 individually hand-colored prints over four years. One hundred sets of The Birds and Trees of North America were produced and sold to collectors, schools and libraries. Twenty complete sets are known to exist today.
“We are thrilled to partner with the Rex Brasher Association to produce these books and help spread awareness of this singular talent,” said Jim Coudal, co-founder of Field Notes. “The Association is currently fundraising to build a museum on Brasher’s home in Kent, CT, and a portion of the proceeds from this edition will be donated to support the effort.”
The set is grouped into two three-packs. Pack A includes the Rocky Mountain and Mexican Screech Owls, the Blue Jay and the Brewer Sparrow; Pack B includes the Pine Grosbeak, the Baltimore Oriole and the Sulphurbelly Flycatcher. The covers are printed on Mohawk Via Felt 100#C in Pure White, a supple and toothsome stock that evokes watercolor paper.
“When you see a Brasher bird, you have seen the bird itself, lifelike and in a natural attitude,” said T. Gilbert Pearson, a conservationist and president of the National Audubon Society from 1920–1934.
