John - Your comment below
about Theodore Roosevelt put me in mind of the following.
Lord Alanbrooke, chief of the British
armed forces through most of WW2, was a keen birdwatcher, in fact one of the
celebrity ‘watchers of a previous generation who no doubt lent prominence
to the activity. In his book A bird in
the bush: a social history of birdwatching Stephen Moss says that in
the crucial relationship between Alanbrooke and Eisenhower there was a ‘touch
of formality’, and that warmth was given to the relationship when E
learnt that A was anxious, but unable, to get a copy off the US book A Book of Birds, and E had a copy of the
book obtained and flown across the Atlantic for presentation to A.
Coincidentally, Alanbrooke, before he was
created baron in 1945, had been Alan Brooke. Most of the paintings in The Book of Birds , including the one on
the pages from the book below, were by Alan Brooks, a retired Canadian army
officer, not connected with Alan Brooke
This was a formative stage in bird
art. Roger Tory Peterson, pioneer of the modern bird field guide, had
published his own first guide in the early 1930s, about the same time as appearance
of the ‘Book of Birds’. In a summary of the history of field
guide art, Peterson later wrote of Brooks: “On the whole paintings
by Brooks are more lush than those by Fuertes, but his birds are not as
sensitively understood … At times his handling of backgrounds was
very successful, especially when portraying the coniferous forests and
mountains of the northwest he knew so well. His southwestern swamps are
not as convincing … Brooks often gave small birds an unnatural fullness
at the nape of the neck, and frequently made them too large-headed and
small-tailed.”
In the 1950s Alanbrooke accompanied
Peterson to southern Spain
where they were both ‘cinematographers’ on the expeditions organized
by Guy Mountfort. In Mountfort’s Portrait
of a Wilderness, there is an incongruous photo of Lord Alanbrooke in
a bowler hat peering through a ‘cinecamera’, looking like a seedy
private detective collecting evidence.
I’ll copy this to the list.
Someone else might be interested.
From: John Layton
[
Sent: Saturday, September 30, 2006
8:29 PM
To: Geoffrey
Dabb
Subject: Books and famous persons
Did you know that man-among-men, American president, Theodore
Roosevelt, admired W-in-W
so much that he helped to get it published in America? When the old Teddy Bear
visited Oxford,
Grahame was one of the "great British authors" he particularly asked
to meet.
