
DATE: Wednesday, November 19, 1997          TAG: 9711190051

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  126 lines

EARLY AMERICANA ON EXHIBIT GROUND-BREAKING PORTRAITS OF ANIMALS BY 18TH CENTURY ARTIST ARE IN COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG.

THE 18TH CENTURY English naturalist-artist Mark Catesby gave the world its first comprehensive look at the plants and animals of North America.

Working from specimens from Virginia and farther south, he made drawings and watercolors, converting those into etchings for his celebrated two-volume book, published in parts from 1731 to 1743, with an appendix completed in 1747.

There is only one set of original drawings and watercolors, and it has been in the collection of the Royal Library at Windsor Castle in England since King George III purchased it in 1768. George III was on the throne when America gained its freedom. He's the one who went nutty for a while because of a metabolic disorder, which was the subject of the 1994 film ``The Madness of King George.''

For the first time ever, Catesby's watercolors have left the library and are touring to four American museums.

The show, ``Mark Catesby's Natural History of North America: The Watercolors From the Royal Library, Windsor Castle,'' opens Thursday at DeWitt Wallace Gallery in Colonial Williamsburg. On display will be 52 of the 263 drawings and watercolors from Windsor Castle, artworks kept bound in fine red leather for more than two centuries.

``They are beautifully conserved,'' said Margaret Pritchard, curator of maps and prints for Colonial Williamsburg. ``The thing that is so devastating to many pieces of art is light damage. These have not seen the light of day.''

Catesby's bold colors and delicate linear descriptions remain intact. They are nearly as fresh as when Catesby created them - a lawyer's son taking a gentleman's hobby to a historic degree.

Catesby's New World adventures began in Williamsburg in 1712, only a dozen years after the colonial capital was founded.

He traveled here to stay with his sister Elizabeth and her physician husband, and to explore the strange new terrain. He stayed seven years, during which he became acquainted with the local plants and animals, and befriended important colonists like William Byrd II of Westover, a plantation on the James River.

``We don't know very much about that first trip,'' said Pritchard, organizer of the show's Williamsburg stop. No letters were found, only a few references made by prominent colonists regarding Catesby's arrival. No drawings or sketches are known to still exist from that trip, she said.

Yet a catalog essay by Amy R.W. Meyers states that he ``traversed the woods and fields of Virginia's Tidewater plantations and traveled up the James River toward the Appalachian Mountains,'' collecting seeds, plants and specimens. He documented the flora and fauna of Virginia, and did the same in Jamaica in 1714.

Five years later, he returned to England and began formulating a plan for his book. He gathered funds and supporters, then returned in 1722 - this time landing in Charleston, S.C.

More is known about this trip, Pritchard said. The primary sources are 20 letters written while he was in America and afterward.

Catesby showed up in what was then known as Charles Town with Francis Nicholson, the new royal governor of South Carolina and his supporter. With Nicholson to introduce him to the finest families, he had instant access to extensive private estates where he could begin his field studies.

He scoured the Carolinas, Florida and the Bahama Islands, taking care to visit the same regions through various seasons, Meyers wrote.

He probably traveled alone, with the occasional assistance of an Indian guide and perhaps a black slave, Pritchard said. He likely toured on horseback and on foot, as practical.

Birds were his primary focus, because they were so numerous and so beautiful. In his book, 109 out of 220 images are of birds, including at least two species that Pritchard said are now extinct - the ivory-billed woodpecker and a passenger pigeon.

In 1726, Catesby was back in London, ready to begin his great life's work - the two-volume book ``The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.''

The first illustrated guide to American species ``was such an important book, and so widely distributed at the time,'' Pritchard said. ``Immediately after he finished it, it went into a second printing and then a third.''

The first printing consisted of about 100 copies. Colonial Williamsburg owns a first and a third edition of the book and will display each in the gallery.

It was the primary source until the arrival of John James Audobon, a naturalist-artist who spent the 1820s and 1830s making watercolors of North American birds, Pritchard said.

``Catesby is commonly considered the equal of Audobon, even though predating him by a century,'' wrote Windsor Castle Librarian Oliver Everett for the catalog.

In his own day, Catesby broke with the norm in natural history illustrations. He made his creatures more lifelike, even though his still look a bit stiff to a modern eye.

He attributed the flatness of his drawings to his lack of art training, even while comforting himself that he really preferred to focus on the purely descriptive mission of his work.

Yet, the advances he made in the field might be called artistic. He almost always paired his creatures with plants with which they bore some relationship, usually as food or shelter. In doing this, he tended to stress a harmony or similarity of color and form.

An Eastern bluebird is shown perched on the stump of a carrion flower plant where the bird might have nested. Meanwhile, the plant's trailing vine forms a lovely, oval frame around the bird, which appears to be bowing to its English audience.

A painted finch and blue linnet are perched on the delicate limbs of a sweet flowering bay plant, their shapes reflected in the bay leaves.

Having spent most of his life on a single project - 35 out of 67 years - he may have felt as mad on occasion as his posthumous patron, George III.

But the mood of the man, and the nature of the passion that drove him, remains a mystery. ``It's sad,'' Pritchard said, ``how little we know.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]

DeWitt Wallce Gallery

"Mark Catesby's Natural History of North America" includes a

croaker, top, and a blue grosbeak, above.