a dove in gold

Unknown artist
Pin with a Finial Shaped as a Dove Sitting on Pomegranates, 525–400 B.C., Gold
7.7 × 0.8 × 0.5 cm (3 1/16 × 5/16 × 3/16 in.), 96.AM.256
Gift of Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman
www.getty.edu

If this beautiful bird pin were mine, I could pin up my hair with it, or pin a loose dress together at my shoulder.  That's what its original owner, an Etruscan of 525-400 B.C. would have done.  Was she hoping to attract romance, or assured of it already?  Doves were favorites of Aphrodite/Venus, and pomegranates have symbolized beauty, love and fertility since the ancient Greeks.  Though the Etruscans lived in the area that eventually became Tuscany, they had transactions with expatriate Greek colonies in southern Italy.  I suspect that's where the idea for this imagery came from.  Just for the color and life  of it, I'll send you to this friendly article on pomegranate symbolism.

and here is southey reporting on a stork

thanks publicdomainpictures.net

In the last post I shared Robert Southey's letter home from Leyden, at the end of which he takes care to check on the family cats.  Most of that letter describes the friendship between his host's son, Lodowijk, and a young stork that fetched up in the family garden:
* * *
. . . I must tell you about his stork. You should know that there are a great many storks in this country and that it is thought a very wicked thing to hurt them. They make their nests, which are as large as a great clothes basket, upon the houses and churches, and frequently, when a house or church is built, a wooden frame is made on the top for the storks to build in. Out of one of these nests a young stork had fallen and somebody wishing to keep him in a garden cut one of his wings. The stork tried to fly, but fell in Mr. Bilderdijk's garden and was found there one morning almost dead; his legs and his bill had lost their color and were grown pale, and he would have died if Mrs. Bilderdijk, who is kind to everybody and everything, had not taken care of him. . . . She gave him food and he recovered. The first night they put him in sort of a summerhouse in the garden, which I cannot describe to you for I have not been there myself; the second night he walked to the door himself that it might be opened to him. He was very fond of Lodowijk and Lodowijk was as fond of his "oyevaar" (which is the name for stork in Dutch, though I am not sure that I have spelled it right) and they used to play together in such a manner that his father says it was a pleasure to see them; for a stork is a large bird, tall and upright, almost as tall as you are or quite. The oyevaar was a bad gardener; he ate snails, but with his great broad foot he did a great deal of mischief, and destroyed all the strawberries and many of the vegetables. But Mr. and Mrs. Bilderdijk did not mind this because theoyevaar loved Lodowijk and therefore they loved the oyevaar, and sometimes they used to send a mile out of town to buy eels for him when none could be had in Leyden.

-- Colson, Elizabeth. Children's Letters: a Collection of Letters Written to Children by Famous Men And Women. New York: Hinds, Noble & Eldredge, 1905. pp. 64-5.

a faithful parrot

The American symbolist painter Elihu Vedder (1836-1923) spent part of his childhood in Cuba.  After a while his parents thought the climate too hot for his health, and he was sent back to the care of his grandparents in New York.  As he writes in his memoir The Digressions of V., he left one particular friend behind him:

...I began to look sallow, and was packed off North. But I left one broken heart behind me, that of poor Cottorita, my parrot. She had been given me very young, and loved as only a parrot or dog can love. I have always been sorry that I did not take the dear thing with me, for she went about for three days after my departure, calling, " Nino Elijio! Nino Elijio! " and then flew away and was never seen again. When I went to the Spanish school she would station herself at the house-door and wait patiently until I came back, and then, climbing up, never quitted my shoulder. When I remember that a parrot can live a hundred years, there is no reason why she should not be rubbing a dear old head against my cheek at this present moment. Grandpa's old parrot, who had passed his youth among sailors and who used to ask, "What o'clock?" and when told the time, would reply, "You be damned!" amused me, but never consoled me for the loss of poor Cottorita.

-- Vedder, Elihu, 1836-1923. The Digressions of V.. London: Constable , 19111910.p. 76.

in which a pet goldfinch is lovingly remembered

Goldfinch, being wild birds, aren't pets for us today.  However, in a book of pet care dated 1862, I found this (unattributed) story of a beloved pet goldfinch's last years.

I myself until lately possessed a goldfinch which I would not have parted with for an entire aviary of the choicest songsters. He was thirteen years old when he came into my keeping, and his eyes were beginning to fail him. They grew weaker and weaker, till at last the glare of the sunlight was more than he could bear, and I made him curtains of green gauze for which he was very grateful, and never failed to reward me with a bit of extra good music when they were pulled round his cage on sultry afternoons. When he was seventeen years old he went quite blind, but that did not at all interfere with the friendship that existed between us. He knew my footstep as I entered the room, he knew my voice,—I do believe he knew my cough and sneeze from any one else's in the house. He was extremely fond of cabbage-seed, and the door of his cage having been previously opened, I had only to enter the room and call out “cabbage-seed, cabbage seed,” to make him fly out of his cage and come to me. Sometimes I would hide behind the window-curtains, or beneath a table, and it was curious to see him put his little blind head on one side for a moment, to listen in what direction my voice proceeded, and then to dart unerringly to my head or shoulder. What is most remarkable, my brother (whose voice is singularly like mine) has often tried to deceive the blind goldfinch by (im)personating me; but I do believe he might have called “cabbage-seed, cabbage-seed,” till it sprouted in his hand, and the blind finch would not stir an inch. One morning when the blind bird was upwards of eighteen years old, I entered the room; alas! he was deaf to the enticement of cabbage-seed—he was dead at the bottom of his cage.

Weir, Harrison, 1824-1906, and Samuel Orchart Beeton. The Book of Home Pets: Showing How to Rear And Manage, In Sickness And In Health, Birds, Poultry, Pigeons, Rabbits, Guinea-pigs, Dogs, Cats, Squirrels, Fancy Mice, Tortoises, Bees, Silkworms, Ponies, Donkeys, Goat, Inhabitants of the Aquarium, Etc. Etc. : With a Chapter On Ferns. London: S.O. Beeton, 1862. 5.

a golden bird in your ear

www.metmuseum.org Rogers Fund, 1922

I have a fanciful thought that perhaps some lover in 11th - 12th century Iran gave these earrings to a beloved, the better to symbolize sweet words chirped in their ears.  Look at the intricacy of the golden scrollwork and granulation (where the little dots are applied).  All that, in a bird only 1.25 inch tall. 
Various birds were of importance in Iranian mythology.  Doves were symbols of love, and also religious messengers; peacocks were royal birds; falcons are a central image of Zoroastrian iconography.  According to this page, birds in general also evoked freedom.  What freedoms were part of wearing these earrings, I wonder?  Freedom to choose a lover?  Freedom of spirit?  Someone wore these once, and I can't help but wish I knew their particular story.

appreciating a caged bird

thanks reusableart.com (PD)

The Caged Canary

Morning fair to night succeeds;
Baby's laughing at the fire;
My canary shells his seeds,
And scrapes his beak against the wire.

Now he's tweet-a-tweeting loud,
Ruffling up his wings and neck;
Now he sleeks his plumage proud,
Cleans it clear of spot or speck.

Now with golden feathers flirting
Water over golden sand;
Now his twittering and chirping
Turns to music loud and grand.

What a carol! Why, I'm certain
It would nearly fill a church;
And he sings, and sings, until he
Almost tumbles off his perch.

Oh! my golden, gay canary,
Singing sweetly in all weathers,
Take the thanks of little Mary,
With the sunshine on your feathers!

Grateful for the smallest favours,
Only sand, and seed, and water—
With your gracious, gay behaviours,
Sweet the lesson you have taught her.

Gemmer, C. M. Children of the Sun, Etc., Etc., Etc.: Poems for the Young. London: F. Warne , 1869.127-8. F. Warne was Beatrix Potter's publisher.

riotous drapery

yale university art gallery (PD)

Around 1720-30 some nameless artist created this oil portrait of "A Hudson Valley Lady with Dog and Parrot."  There's a charming primitive feel to this work, though drapery was definitely the painter's strong point.  Stop and look at how that pink wrap is so animated it's practically a player in and of itself.  Now we're going to see the parrot. . .

Sort of pigeon-y, this parrot, but I like him.  Speaking of animated. . .

. . .that dog has been caught in mid-flail, wanting that parrot so badly.  What a charming, funny scene.  Whomever the lost painter might have been, I hope he (or she!) enjoyed the work.

a duchess finds fellowship with rooks

thanks british library flickr
yes, I know they're ravens not rooks
you try finding PD images of rooks

Princess Frederica Charlotte of Prussia (1767-1820) became the Duchess of York upon her marriage to George III's son Prince Frederick, the Duke of York.  As we so often hear about the lives of the supposedly exalted, that didn't make for a happy ever after (not that her life had been all that happy before).  Having fallen out of love, and without hope of children, the couple separated; the Duchess retired to Oatlands Park in Weybridge, surrounding herself with pets.  Here's what a history of the
Oatlands estate records of her:
* * *
Her Royal Highness had an eccentric taste for keeping pet-dogs, and near the grotto there were between sixty and seventy small upright stones, inscribed with the names of an equal number of dogs, which were buried here by direction of the Duchess: she extended her kindness even to the rooks, which, when driven from the neighbouring fields, experienced a marked protection on this demesne, where, finding themselves in security, they soon established a flourishing rookery. This humane trait in the character of the Duchess was thus commemorated by Lord Erskine:

"At Oatlands, where the buoyant air
Vast crowds of Rooks can scarcely bear
What verdure paints returning spring!
What crops surrounding harvests bring!
Yet swarms on every tree are found,
Nor hear the Fowler's dreaded sound.
And when the Kite's resistless blow .
Dashes their scattered nests below,
Alarmed, they quit the distant field,
To seek the Park's indulgent shield;
Where close in the o'ershadowing wood
They build new castles for their brood,
Secure, their fair Protectress nigh
Whose bosom swells with sympathy."
***

-- Timbs, J. Abbeys, castles and ancient balls of England and Wales, their legendary lore, and popular history. Re-ed. by A. Gunn. London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1872. 147.

I found an article on the dogs' graves.  Here that is.

gingerbread stamp rabbit

Image courtesy of York Museums Trust :: https://yorkmuseumstrust.org.uk :: CC BY-SA 4.0

Nothing fancy here.  You might have one of these gingerbread molds in your own house, looking no differently than this one - but this dates from approximately 1750 to 1850.  Why is it, I wonder, that we have always liked to press images of cute animals on our cookies?  (I get why we don't put ugly things on our cookies.)

vintage wordless wednesday

thanks ampersand

a hummingbird interlude

From a 1908 memoir of beloved pets, mostly injured wild birds:  Marshall Saunders recalls a brief sojourn with a young hummingbird.

One summer evening a man brought me a young humming-bird, and said that his cat had caught it, but fortunately he had been able to rescue it before any harm had been done. The little bird was cold and feeble, and, taking him in my hand, I put his head against my face. After the manner of young hummingbirds with their parents, before they leave the nest, he put his tiny bill into my mouth and thrust out an extremely long and microscopic tongue in search of food.
He soon discovered that he was not with his parents.  I had neither honey nor insects for him. However, I did the next best thing, and sent to a druggist for the purest honey that he had. In the meantime, I put my tiny visitor on the window-boxes. The old hummingbirds must have taken all the honey, for he seemed to find nothing there to satisfy him until I put some of that the druggist sent into the blossoms. I held them to his bill, and he drank greedily, then, after looking around the room, he flew up to a picture-frame, put his head under his wing, and went to sleep.
The next morning at daylight I looked up at the picture. The humming-bird woke up, said “Peep, peep!” a great number of times, in a thin, sweet voice, no louder than a cricket’s chirp, but did not come down. I got up, filled a nasturtium with honey, pinned it to a stick, and held it up to my little visitor, who was charmed to have his breakfast in bed. Finally, he condescended to come down, visited other flowers and had more drinks, then I opened the window and told him he was too lovely and too exquisite an occupant for an aviary, and he had better seek his brilliant brothers of the outer air.

-- Saunders, M. (1908). My pets; real happenings in my aviary. Toronto: The Ryerson Press. 235-6.

the human-chicken bond

thanks pixabay

How did the chicken cross the road?
Turns out that's a really good question, and the answer seems to be "By tagging along with their human buddies."  When you think that your basic model of chicken is a creature native to Southeast Asia, and then drive down the street in urban Portland past somebody's front yard with oh so hip coopful of fowl, you have to ask how that happened.
Luckily for all of us chicken fans, there's "Cultural & Scientific Perceptions of Human-Chicken Interactions."  A project including no less than six British universities, scicultchickens.org aims to research and explain what chickens have been to us, and when and how.  There's a database of archaeological chicken bone finds, a blog of various activities in chicken-human research (the latest post at time of writing is an examination of chickens in video games), a gallery with an interpretation of imaginary chicken breeds, and much more.
There's a related, more informal website on the topic too - Chicken Coop.

friday foolishness

Image taken from page 134 of Woodland Romances; or, Fables and Fancies

(PD)

 

 

 

This silly scene isn't pet-related, I know.  I came across it while I was finishing up this latest side project, and it was too delightful not to share for Friday.  So TGIF to you all.

just a bird on a vine

http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.46008  image courtesy the rijksmuseum (PD)

Here's Utagawa Hiroshige, the master known for the "100 Views of Edo" of 1848 on, with a look at a smaller world entirely: a woodcut dated round 1833-7, known at the Rijksmuseum as "Vogel en blauwe winde" (Bird on a blue bindweed).  Though known for his landscapes, Hiroshige was also lauded for his birds and flowers, and you see why.  This gray fellow has a typically alert face, but with a comic quirk to his beak, an interrogating look:  what, buddy?  I also love the smooth oval of his body.  So much bird, so little gesture to create him.

wrapped in nightingales?

gift of W. T. Sesnon (M.55.6) www.lacma.org

Perhaps this textile wouldn't be so comfortable for a nap or for loungewear, as it contains metallic threads along its silk ones.  Even so, looking at this 17th-century Iranian textile brings soothing thoughts of perfumed gardens and birdsong, as if you could drape it around yourself and be transported there.  I believe this to be a variant of a pattern popular in its time, the "rose and nightingale" motif (gul-o-bul-bul), which symbolized the union of the lover and the beloved.  I know the birds look a lot like sun conures, but take a peek at this print from the Met for a gul-o-bul-bul motif that does essentially look a lot like this.  The Met also has an informative article about Iranian textiles of this period that I found interesting.

draw a bird day 2016

i can't draw

I heard it from a Mutts comic: April 8th is Draw a Bird Day.  All you have to do is draw a bird and share it.  The point?  Sharing.  This began in an English hospital in 1943, when a little girl went to visit her uncle.  He had been wounded in the war, and to distract him the little girl asked him to draw her a bird.  So he did:  a bird which was not great art, but made her laugh and promise to put it on her wall.  Soon fellow patients were handing her this bird drawing and that, and as these things do, it snowballed from there.  Why April 8th?  That was the little girl's birthday.  Sadly, she never lived to be old, but the birds happen every year inn her memory.  The Draw a Bird Day website will tell you the whole story, and has lots of birds to share.
And me, your friendly Curator? I cannot draw, but I love wrens a great deal.  Here's my wren.  What did you draw?

saint hugh's friends

thanks vintage printable (PD)

In an account of the Carthusian monks of Somerset, we learn this about the 12th-century Saint Hugh of Lincoln:

Like many another deeply religious man, St. Hugh had unbounded love to all living things. As at Villarbenoit, his care to serve his brethren had led to his being intrusted with the charge of his aged father, so now he was appointed to attend to all the personal wants of an old monk, who in return seems to have looked after his spiritual welfare. But his love did not show itself to his fellow-men only; it condescended also to the smaller beings of creation. The saint could find some solace for his combats with the evil one by taming the little birds and squirrels of that wild neighbourhood to come into his cell, where, during his meals, they would eat at his table, feeding out of his dish or from his hand. The stern Prior, however, forbade him even this one amusement, lest he should take too much pleasure in his dumb friends and allow them to interrupt his devotions. It was not till he got to Witham that he could indulge his affection for animals; there for three years a pet bird lived in his cell, taking its flight at nesting-time and returning later on with its fledgings as if to present them to him; but in the fourth year it came back no more, to his great vexation. Again, when Bishop of Lincoln, an unusually fine swan attached itself to him, showing as much affection for him as a dog.

One of Hugh's attributes is a swan, not surprisingly.  This great blog post will tell you all about Hugh and his buddy.

The excerpt is from: Thompson, E. Margaret. (1895). A history of the Somerset Carthusians. London: J. Hodges. 51-2.

on the tame canary

The Tame Canary
The canary is easily tamed, and has been taught to perform many little tricks, indeed groups of them have been trained to act little plays, firing cannons and driving coaches. The canary shows a humane disposition, has been known to foster the young of other birds, to make friends with other pets, even cats; to show great affection for its master and to die of grief on the loss of its mate. Dr. Darwin tells of  "a canary bird which always fainted away when its cage was cleaned. Having desired to see the experiment," says Dr. Darwin, "the cage was taken from the ceiling, and the bottom drawn out. The bird began to tremble, and turned quite white about the root of the bill; he then opened his mouth as if for breath, and respired quickly; stood up straighter on his perch, hung his wing, spread his tail, closed his eyes, and appeared quite stiff for half an hour, till at length, with trembling and deep respirations, he came gradually to himself."

Poor little guy!  This anecdote comes from p. 277 of  Natural History in Anecdote: Illustrating the Nature, Habits, Manners and Customs of Animals, Birds, Fishes, Reptiles, Insects, Etc., Etc., Etc, Alfred Henry Miles, Ed. (Dodd, Mead, 1895).

two rabbits with a bunch of stuff

thanks wikimedia commons. public domain.

Here are Zwei Kaninchen in einem umgestülpten Korb mit einer Blaumeise auf einer Sonnenblume.  What a mouthful!  It means "Two rabbits in an upturned basket with a blue tit on a sunflower."  This genre piece by the German painter Johann Amandus Winck (1748-1817) probably wasn't titled when created, so somebody made do with a string of description.  The titmouse, and by extension the coal tit and blue tit, were sacred and auspicious creatures to Germans.  Rabbits were very often fertility symbols, so I wonder if this pretty piece was actually a good-luck present to a woman expecting, or a positive thought to a house that wanted children.

a couple more wills in favor of pets

These were only two of a booklet full of curious, generous bequests in Mrs. Wm. Pitt Byrne's
Curiosities of the Search-room: A Collection of Serious, and Whimsical Wills . . .

BEQUEST TO A PARROT.
A rich and eccentric widow, whose will was proved in London some years ago, left at her death a parrot, whom, "having been her faithful companion for 24 years," she left in charge of an appointee, with an annuity of one hundred guineas, the existence and identity of the bird to be proved twice a year, and all payments to be withheld from the moment the feathered pensioner ceased to be produced.

A CATS' HOME.
A Mr. Jonathan Jackson, of Columbus, Ohio, died a few years ago, leaving orders to his executors to erect a cats' home, the plans and elevation of which he had drawn out with great care and thought. The building was to contain dormitories, a refectory, areas for conversation, grounds for exercise, and gently sloping roofs for climbing, with rat-holes for sport, an "auditorium," within which the inmates were to be assembled daily to listen to an accordion, which was to be played for an hour each day by an attendant, that instrument being the nearest approach to their natural voices. (Wait, what?  - curator) An infirmary, to which were to be attached a surgeon and three or four professed nurses, was to adjoin the establishment. No mention seems to have been made of a chapel or a chaplain! The testator gives as his reason for thus disposing of his property that "it is man's duty as lord of animals to watch over and protect the lesser and feebler, even as God watches over and protects man." He does not, however, explain how it happens that on this principle he does not consider it his duty to protect rats from the "sporting"propensities of cats.

(Published in London by Chapman and Hall, 1880, excerpt from p. 198-9.)