A bird does not wait for a painter. Before cameras, painters had to find other ways to study feathers in motion, and the twelve pictures here, from Albrecht Dürer's Wing of a European Roller to Carel Fabritius's The Goldfinch, show what they tried.
Some birds also carried a message. Cranes circling Emperor Huizong's palace in 1112 became a sign from heaven, and Jan Asselijn's swan of about 1650 turned into a political cartoon after his death.
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Birds have drawn painters back again and again, for two reasons. Plumage is a chance to show off color and fine detail, and for centuries these creatures have also carried ideas, from wisdom to long life.
The trouble is that a bird never holds a pose. Most attempts to paint one came out stiff, and a stiff bird looks stuffed.
So painters found ways around that restlessness. Some worked from dead specimens or borrowed the animals of royal menageries. Others watched for hours from hiding places, or painted from memory.
The birds on this list are never mere decoration, even when they are small. Some pictures made it for the way their painter solved that problem, others for the meaning a bird was made to carry, from an omen to a political fight.
12. Albrecht Dürer, Wing of a European Roller (about 1500)
One wing of a European roller, a bird with brilliant blue plumage, lies open on a small square of vellum, the fine calfskin that artists used as a luxury paper. There is no head, no branch and no sky.
The study is by Albrecht Dürer, the painter and engraver of Nuremberg, in watercolor and gouache, an opaque kind of watercolor that covers the layer beneath it.
The sheet carries the date 1512. Most scholars nevertheless place it around 1500.
The wing is alone because Dürer worked from a dead bird. A living roller would never have kept its wing spread long enough to be painted feather by feather. Separated from the body, the wing could be laid open and studied at leisure.
That method explains the detail that stands out up close, the barbs. These are the fine strands that branch off the central shaft of each feather, and a quick brush merges them into a single patch of color. Dürer kept them apart, strand by strand.
He treated the color with equal patience. The blue is brightest in the upper part of the wing, darkens along the long flight feathers and turns almost black at their tips.
Even the place where the wing joined the body gets that attention. At the top right, short brown and rust red feathers stick out in a ragged tuft, and they are painted as precisely as the blue ones.
At a Glance
Artist: Albrecht Dürer (1471 to 1528)
Made: Around 1500 (the sheet is inscribed 1512)
Medium: Watercolor and gouache heightened with white, on vellum
Size: 19.6 × 20 cm (7.7 × 7.9 in)
Where to see it: Albertina, Vienna
11. Bruno Liljefors, Sea Eagle's Nest (1907)
A great mound of dead branches fills the lower half of the canvas. On top of it stand two sea eagles, small against the pile and dark against a pale northern sky. Sea Eagle's Nest, Havsörnbo in Swedish, is a canvas of 1907 by the Swedish painter Bruno Liljefors.
Sea eagles build their nests high in old trees. To paint a pair from close up, Liljefors had to find a way up to them without ever being noticed.