Martin Elliott is bone-tired. “I’ve been working through the night,” says the artist, painting albatrosses, skuas and petrels for a local exhibition. Earlier this year, Elliott spent several weeks as a passenger on an Antarctic cruise, sketching the birds whenever they appeared on the horizon. He hopes that the cruise line will be convinced to buy up the whole exhibition to replace their vessel’s on-board gallery of bird art — if you can even call it that. “I’ve never seen anything quite as hideous in my life,” says Elliott, who suspects the paintings originated as AI prompts before they were painted in presumably poorly lit sweatshops. “It’s revolting.”
Elliott should know. As one of Britain’s foremost ornithological illustrators, the Penzance resident knows a thing or two about the work it takes to accurately portray our avian cousins. His is a small but invaluable community within the birding world, one that spends countless hours out in the field observing their subjects in flight or at rest. And then, when they can crouch in their hides no longer, they spend even more time creating scenes, in pencil or paint, that help your average twitcher identify species at a glance.
Elliott himself always wanted to be an illustrator, albeit as a means to see the birds he always loved. Another inspiration, he adds, was an ornate field guide to the falcons of the world owned by his uncle — which he immediately ruined by tracing over all the full-page illustrations, commonly known as “plates”. Even so, says Elliott, who now specialises primarily in gulls, “I’ve never, ever been interested in art as a thing,” with the artist getting kicked out of his A-Level course because of his lack of interest in the Old Masters. “I wanted to learn how to paint,” he says, “not how they did it 200 years ago.”
Elliott’s experience mirrors many other illustrators: see, for example, renowned artists David Allen Sibley and Lars Jonsson, who are both entirely self-taught (“Lars is God,” says Elliott), or Hilary Burn, who fell into ornithological illustration via a zoological degree. Then there’s Ian Lewington, Elliott’s friend and former rival. Lewington’s brother, Richard, was already a leading entomological illustrator by the time Ian was a child. “He went in the bird direction instead of the insect direction, which is probably just as well,” Elliott tells me. “Bird illustration is niche enough without getting into beetles and stuff like that.”
Lewington is now a household name in the birding community. His bread and butter remains the field guide, including the Rare Birds of North America, a 275-plate tome where Lewington captures his subjects in almost photographic detail. Like many of his contemporaries, Lewington is himself a birder, travelling to see each one of his subjects in the wild before applying his water-soluble gouache paints to paper.
“If you haven’t seen what you’re painting,” Lewington explains, “you don’t know how wrong you’ve got it.” Seeing the bird in person does allow you to capture its essential mien, or “jizz” in twitcher parlance. It’s an ethos shared by most ornithological illustrators and one that came comparatively late to the field. Depictions of birds for identification and general study arguably began with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II’s De Arte Venandi cum Avibis (“On the Art of Hunting with Birds”) in 1245, though palpably useful guides would not arrive until the late 18th century, as ornithology developed as a field in its own right. It is here, arguably, that naturalistic representations of birds in fine art and science began to diverge. Indeed, as antiquarian print expert David Isaac explains, such plates are largely so prized because they speak so vividly to human affairs.
Italian artist Saverio Manetti (1723-85), for instance, dedicated each of his illustrations to Tuscan dignitaries, imbuing them with personality traits more associated with his patrons than the actual bird. In many cases, too, illustrators were unable to make the long sea voyages necessary to observe their subjects in the wild, instead relying on partially stuffed carcasses known as “skins”. That sometimes led to confusion. George Edwards (1694-1773) may have thought it entirely plausible that a guinea pig might sidle alongside his frightened-looking dodo: despite the fact that the former have never been native to Mauritius.
Yet all the while, improvements in knowledge, printing techniques and the ability of artists to see birds in their natural habitats led to a golden age in ornithological illustration: one more firmly rooted in science. That’s clear enough with John James Audubon who, while he wasn’t writing pro-slavery screeds, blasted countless birds out of trees with his flintlock across the hills and woods of North America. Memorialising his victims on the page, Audubon’s life-size plates are just as remarkable two centuries on, depicting hundreds of birds in unprecedented detail and, having mounted many of his specimens on wood and wire dioramas, in realistic situations.
Combined with the work of luminaries like Elizabeth Gould, these depictions would adorn folios dedicated almost entirely to the visual representation of avian life, and remain celebrated by collectors for their extravagant and singular beauty. “I’ve just sold two Gould’s to a guy in New York,” says Isaac. “All he collects is Gould birds; that’s all he does. He’s got 3,000 to go.”
But while Audubon and Gould are admired by ornithological illustrators, the evolution of printing techniques and visual media means that they no longer serve as practical sources of inspiration for their modern successors. Where 19th-century artists could only rely on their own eye, memory and a skin or two to produce an accurate rendition of a condor or a bird of paradise, the modern illustrator can also count on photographs and video.
Each has its pros and cons, says Lewington, that only confirm the continuing relevance of the illustrative art in modern ornithology. Video, for example, is good for obtaining new information about posture, gait and shape. Photos, for their part, are great for colouring in the “soft” parts — the bill, the eyes, the legs — but can misrepresent how light falls on feathers. That’s where “skins” can still be useful, explains Jillian Ditner, a staff scientific illustrator and lecturer at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The institute boasts a sizeable collection of these tiny carcasses mounted on wooden sticks, which Ditner and her colleagues call “popsicles”. Jokey name aside, they can tell researchers much about a bird’s colour, form and texture.
The incredible value in having access to these and their skeletons, Ditner adds, was lately demonstrated in her illustration of a crossbill. A type of finch, it feeds on seeds hidden inside pinecones. “I wanted to look specifically at the skull and how, when it opens, the bill tips align to be able to get in between the pinecone scales and then how, when they take their bill out, the bills are very crossed, and that helps to hold these scales up and retrieve that seed,” Ditner explains. “I wouldn’t be able to do [that] without access to the collection.”
Amid this almost fanatical emphasis on accuracy, has any of that enthusiasm for imbuing character in the bird survived? It depends on the context, Ditner says. In the field guides that occupy the lion’s share of commissions, there is a form to be followed: the species is usually depicted side-on but in multiple guises, all the better to display differences in gender, plumage or feeding habits. Rarely is there also room to add, say, a glint of menace in an eagle’s eye, or the hovering presumptuousness of the European robin. These innovations tend to appear instead in the larger plates that break up the guide, or journal covers, where, by necessity, the artist needs to grab the viewer and make them invested — or at least mildly interested — in the history of the species.
Surely it’s the ability to accomplish precisely this that separates the good bird illustrator from the bad? Lewington disagrees. Art, he argues, is subjective. But illustration is the opposite: “objective and totally quantifiable”. A depiction of a bird in a field guide is either correct or it is not. What’s left over in an exceptional illustration, he adds, are usually identifying hallmarks of the artist themselves. Lars Jonsson’s birds, for instance, are recognisable as his because they look mildly obese, likely because they puff up their feathers in his native Sweden. But “the perfect illustration,” says Lewington, “will have nothing of the illustrator in it… that sounds terrible, doesn’t it?”
That is not to imply, however, that bird illustration has attained a universal standard. Bad depictions containing anatomical howlers still haunt the medium, says Lewington. “There’s been so much rubbish published,” says Lewington, a little mournfully. “It’s not been consistent, not consistent at all.”
Ornithological illustration isn’t only threatened by bad artists — demand for quality depictions also seems to be declining. Having just finished work on another field guide on the rare birds of North America, this one incorporating over 800 species, Lewington fears that the demand for new field guides has dried up. In his view, the market’s saturated. “I don’t think there are many field guides that are needed,” he says, “or that will be commissioned.”
That’ll make a difficult job even more precarious. While Ditner and Lewington both enjoy some measure of job security, most illustrators are forced to supplement their income with innumerable side-hustles. Elliott, for his part, makes up for shortfalls in commissions by working as a part-time wildlife guide in Penzance, along with the odd spot of gardening and interior decorating. He worries that the efflorescence of interest in birding in the Seventies and Eighties is also waning, as fewer young people join in. Elliott recalls standing in the buffet line on his Antarctic cruise and shouting “Wandering Albatross!” to puzzled passengers as it almost skimmed the plate-glass windows with its wing tips. “One bloke looked up from his cornflakes,” he says. Everybody else “thought I was complaining about the food”.
“Most illustrators are forced to supplement their income with innumerable side-hustles”
As so often, AI might also muscle the humble illustrator out of the picture, with large language models now capable of instantly creating seemingly photorealistic depictions of almost anything. Ditner is sceptical, however, that publishers will see machine art as a viable option in the near future. “I don’t think it can replace the creativity and perspective of an artist,” she says. At the same time, these models are still reliant on human prompts and, like stochastic parrots, still regurgitate overly generic examples from their training data. Certainly, a depiction of an accurate skeleton of an individual species would be completely beyond the capabilities of AI, incapable as it would be of mapping the subtle nuances in bone structure that have evolved over millions of years.
Even so, Ditner sees AI in her future, most probably as an assistive tool, just like digital tools like Adobe Illustrator have become invaluable for illustrators putting the finishing touches to individual portraits. Elliott, meanwhile, is less worried about the machines and more man’s impact on the birds themselves. “I don’t know,” he says, “if bird illustration’s got a future.” In the past, Elliot continues, illustrations were a way of encouraging people to care for their natural environment. But now, he adds, we’re at the point where, thanks to climate change and pollution, many of the species prized by illustrators — including Elliott’s beloved albatross — will be extinct in a decade’s time.
For the moment, the small fraternity of ornithological illustrators continues to stumble along. Muddled breakfasters aside, Elliott still dreams of watching albatrosses skim the Antarctic waves. “I’m seriously thinking of moving to Argentina and just staying in Ushuaia,” he says, one endangered species observing another across the icy waves.
