Louis fuertes biography wife

As I came to know more and more about birds, that view reversed itself, although in spite of both men working in the same genre and friends of each other comparing them is at least partly a matter of comparing apples and oranges. That said, Fuertes was significantly more variable in his approach, often creating very esthetically pleasing compositions showing various bird behaviors.

One can see this in his very earliest work, such as his exquisite pen and ink drawings published in the book, A-Birding on a Bronco , by Florence A. Merriam, published in You can see for yourself here: scanned. I particularly draw your attention the wrens on page 32 to turn pages put your courser in the middle of the page and click and especially the highly interesting pose and angle the young artist chose for the catbird on page Gilbert Pearson, first published in and found in every library and in the home of nearly everyone in North America who was in any way interested in wild birds.

In Fuertes married.

It featured a set of plates Fuertes had done early in his highly successful career showing all the species then known to occur in New York State, in color. Later Brooks would convince Fuertes to try a gouache approach, with more opaque colors, plus the use of Chinese white and tinted paper and it worked extremely well, resulting in paintings more esthetically pleasing to my eye, and resulting in some of the best bird paintings in existence.

Also, when tasked with painting wild mammals, still in the classic watercolor form, Fuertes created some gems when portraying the smaller and middle-sized mammals. Mind you, when he was assigned to paint dog breeds for National Geographic Magazine, his heart was obviously not in it, with very poor results. They are not his best work and one can tell he was not all that enthused by the project, but that said, minus his best work they were still the finest American bird illustrations one could find at that time!

But in my most formative early years of which I speak I knew nothing of them. My second exposure to his work came from among the last paintings he did, during an expedition to Ethiopia over the winter of These were quick studies from freshly shot birds, and some mammals, designed to preserve the colors of the un-feathered portions of the birds, such as beaks, eyes and feet, and far more than that, the all-important facial expression and contours.