Curio

State Library of New South Wales
(Feral pigeon) Columbia livia domestica

(Feral pigeon) Columbia livia domestica

2009

Watercolour Plate, Pigeons and Doves in Australia, 2005–2009

PXD 1408 / 1


New South Wales artist, Bill Cooper’s scientific natural history illustrations, especially of birds, earned him global renown. Self-taught and particularly respected for his species knowledge and extreme precision, Cooper’s attention to detail enabled him to captured the exact display of his avian subjects, each set within their natural environment. This image is from Cooper’s final series of bird paintings, about which he said, ‘I have always had an interest in pigeons and thought they would make a nice book…’; this volume won the Royal Zoological Society of NSW’s 2015 Whitley Award for the most outstanding illustrated text on the fauna of the Australasian region. 


Apart from their working-class Newcastle connection, Copper and Dobell’s early lives had many parallels. Dobell had left school at 14, Cooper at 15, Dobell wanted to be a commercial artist and started out drawing shoes for drapers' shops, while Cooper began painting backdrops in store windows.


In 1992, the Academy of Natural Sciences Philadelphia, USA, awarded Cooper a gold medal for distinction in natural art history, the first and only Australian recipient in its 190-year history.


Sir David Attenborough was so impressed with Cooper's skill – 'Australia's greatest living scientific painter of birds' and 'possibly the best in the world' – that he has collected examples of his work and made him the subject of a TV documentary, Portrait Painter to the Birds (1993). 


In the 1940s, the young Bill Cooper was befriended by leading Australian artist Sir William Dobell; the older artist strongly advising Cooper not to go to art school but to develop his own style.