Book reviews

Biographers must believe in their subjects’ importance, but Penny Olsen has much on her side in writing about Neville Henry Cayley and his son Neville William. The father established the name in Australian bird art in the 1890s, and his son made it famous with What Bird is That? , the first complete continental guide and Australian birders’ vade mecum for 40 years. No other family so prominently served Australian ornithology, bird study and bird art for so long, and it is difficult to find comparable cases elsewhere. The men deserve attention, and Cayley & Son does a valuable service in treating them together. The book has biographical sections on their hardly overlapping careers (Neville William was 17 when his father died), and generous portfolios – 54 pages of the father’s work and 43 of the son’s – supplemented by illustrations and photographs scattered through the text. The art ranges from paintings of birds in their habitat through field guide illustrations to dust jacket art and ephemera; an inclusive sampling, and the almost square format (pages measure 28 23 cm) makes it an attractive volume. Leave it open on the table, please. Olson’s year-by-year accounts put the Cayleys in the context of their daily lives, giving readers a glimpse into art, bird art, science, conservation and how these changed over the decades. Neville Henry’s case almost requires this sort of close study, for he arrived in Melbourne in 1877 without much of a plan except getting ahead, and found his way in colonies with little institutional support for art or science. By 1880 he had a name as an artist, by 1885 as a bird artist and, in 1893, his work was displayed in the New South Wales court at the Chicago World’s Fair. By then his reputation stood high enough for someone to put his name on what Olsen delicately termed ‘Cayley-inspired watercolours’ (p. 36). Fame did not pay the bills, though, and he struggled all his life, accepting various commissions to make ends meet and trading pictures for goods and services. He planned, but could not bring to press, a book of hand-coloured plates of Australian birds, and died not yet 50 years old, having produced, Olsen judged, ‘some very fine works’, but much that bore the traces of haste and dependence on a few popular themes (p. 42). Neville William, born in 1886, studied landscape painting before following his father into bird art; but, where his father was an artist who painted birds and joined art societies, he painted birds to serve his interest in natural history and conservation, joined the Royal Australian Ornithologists’ Union, and made a career at the intersection of science, art, nature preservation and commercial illustration. Like his father, he projected an ambitious study of Australian birds, reminiscent of the nineteenth century works of John Gould and John James Audubon, but though the world had changed since Neville Henry’s day it had not changed enough. Olsen’s account (pp. 110–121) of the shifting fortunes of the work offers a mini-lecture on Australian publishing, bird art, national ornithology and conservation. What emerged from the presses was ‘a reasonably priced book that would allow [people] to identify the birds that they encountered’. That would seem a comedown fromanexpensive art book except thatWhatBird is That? became ‘the most popular and persistent bird book ever likely to be produced in Australia, if not the world’ (p. 123): one that inspired generations of Australians, introduced thousands of visitors to the wonders of Australia’s birds, and built the market for the next generation of field guides. Cayley continued to paint and bring out bird books for another 15 years, shaping Australians’ encounters with their land, but the riches, alas, accrued mainly to the nation. He died impoverished, at 64. This study has the virtues of a close focus on its subjects and many examples of their work, but Olsen can offer only glimpses of the Cayleys’ place in bird art and even the portfolios make things more difficult for the serious student by relegating the identifying information about the plates to the back matter. Failing time and money for a museum tour of Europe and North America, readers should use the library and the internet to gain perspective. Neville Henry’s anthropomorphic paintings, such as the well-known ‘Dignity and Impudence’ (p. 15), the variously titled ones of a black duck just as it was shot (p. 23) and his still-lifes of dead and hanging ducks (pp. 46–47) appear in European and Europeaninfluenced art of the era, and Neville William’s plates of birds’ eggs, species’ portraits and field guide illustrations fit their times equally well. Particularly for the younger Cayley, a wider view helps. Olsen can only touch on the complexities and challenges of commercial art, which required not just art, but art that available technology could faithfully and inexpensively reproduce in enormous quantities. Field guide illustrations, which had as well to stress each species’ distinctive marks, constituted a form of their own. Olsen mentions some of the issues, noting Cayley’s first edition had small images crowded together and that he arranged birds by habitat rather than taxonomy, but placing one of Cayley’s plates, say the ‘typical plate’ reproduced on page 122, alongside Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds (1934, re-issued by Houghton Mifflin after Peterson’s death in 1996), shows Cayley’s solutions to the field guide’s perpetual dilemma: balancing cost against quality. Colour helped the reader, but the cost of these plates could easily drive the book’s price too high for a mass market. Given that constraint and the number of species he had to portray, Cayley’s crowded plates may well be excused. His arrangement of birds by habitat seems odd now, but the strategy harked back to early guides and still appears in introductory books aimed at readers who can’t tell a stork from a crane but do know if they are at the shore or in a swamp. As for what to call the bird, well, that has always been contentious. Guides, particularly early ones, often included several popular names as well as the scientists’ ‘official’ English-language one, and in 1941 Peterson found the problem of subspecies and what to call them so contentious he included a long appendix in his guide to the Western United States to head off criticism. (He was not entirely successful.) Cayley and Son introduces readers to these men and their work; it should stimulate greater interest in bird art; and it makes an ideal gift for the birder in the family.