Dr. Robert Montgomery Bird is a writer who is relatively little recalled today. When he is remembered, it is rarely for his plays and is instead only for the one of his novels that remains readily (as opposed to expensively) available, Nick of the Woods. The point of the exhibition that the Library has mounted and which we celebrate today is to draw renewed attention to him as a writer--attention he deserves.
In addition, we hope also to indicate that he was not only a writer but also an artist who, though an amateur, is worthy of notice. His surviving watercolors (many of them seen here for the first time), as well as his photographs (now preserved at The Library Company), provide new evidence about Dr. Bird's general esthetic interests and activities. They indicate the richness of the cultural milieu within which he was raised, in New Castle, Delaware, and here in Philadelphia. They also reflect back on the literature for which Bird is already known.
As Curator of this show, I can add that there are few pleasures in any curator's life as intense as that of bringing to public notice something hitherto almost completely unknown but which is also worth knowing. This exhibit provides an exemplary instance of just this kind.
It would, of course, have been, quite simply, unthinkable without the interest and cooperation of Dr. Bird's descendent, also named Robert Montgomery Bird, and Mrs. Bird. Dr. Bird went to Penn, graduating from our Medical School in 1827. Mr. Bird is a Haverford graduate. We are thus all the more in his debt for his signal willingness to share the pleasures of his ancestor's art works with this institution, merely--from some points of view--a large neighbor to his own.
Such interest and cooperation deserve notice as well as thanks but much more important is the debt that this exhibit and its Curator also owe to the preliminary work that Mr. Bird undertook with Dr. Bird's watercolors long before this exhibition was a gleam in anybody's eye. Over years of patient but necessary spadework, he organized, cataloged, described, and began efforts to preserve Dr. Bird's hitherto scattered art works. Simultaneously, he undertook reading and research in order to relate them to the chronology of Dr. Bird's life and to his already known dramatic and literary works. This work provided the framework in which my colleagues and I could look at what would have otherwise seemed a disorganized mass of watercolors. He has, quite simply, made it possible for us to see these works by providing the basic outlines of the context in which they can be understood.
I want to add as well my gratitude to Michael Ryan, Director for Special Collections, for his support throughout this project, and to Greg Bear, whose hands and eye are responsible for whatever in the exhibition's physical layout look good. Between them, Robert Bird, Michael Ryan, and Greg Bear made the job of getting this exhibition up a pleasure.
In addition, two colleagues from The Library Company--Kenneth Finkel, formerly Curator of Prints (and now moved to the William Penn Foundation), and James Green, Assistant Librarian--have both taken time to speak with me about Dr. Bird and his art, photography, and writing. I am grateful to them both.
When, almost two years ago, we began to plan this event, I spoke with a person who specializes in American literature and asked that person to speak on this occasion. That person refused. He found Bird, especially in his 1837 novel Nick of the Woods, which concerns the settlement of Kentucky during the 1780s, a reprehensibly racist writer. Bird, it seems, portrays Native Americans unfavorably.
Well, yes, he does. There seems little reason to try to waltz around that fact, uncomfortable as we may find it. Nor can we offer as a defense that his were simply the attitudes of his era, for in fact they were not always shared even by Bird's own contemporaries; and Bird is occasionally defensive about them himself. Introducing Nick of the Woods, published in 1837, for example, Bird wrote:
We owe, perhaps, some apology for the hues we have thrown around the Indian portraits in our picture,--hues darker than are usually employed by the painters of such pictures. But, we confess, the North American savage has never appeared to us the gallant and heroic personage he seems to others.The English novelist William Harrison Ainsworth may be the sort of commentator about whom Bird worried and to whom he offered such advance apologies. Ainsworth liked Nick well enough to publish it in the same year as its American edition for an English audience. He also introduced that edition over his own name. Nonetheless, he did so with the condescending comment that
Dr. BIRD exhibits . . . the Aborigines of North America not as men possessing . . . heroic virtues . . . but as wretches stained by every vice, and having no one redeeming quality. According to our author, they are crafty, perfidious, cruel, and dastardly; and are guilty, moreover, of making war upon women and children. . . . Dr. BIRD's views on this subject are coloured by national antipathy . . .In the book's second edition, published in 1853, Bird replied to such criticism, specifically citing Ainsworth. Referring to himself in the third person, he wrote:
If he drew his Indian portraits with Indian ink, rejecting the brighter pigments which might have yielded more brilliant effects, and added an 'Indian-hater' to the group, it was because he aimed to give, not the appearance of truth, but truth itself--or what he held to be truth--to the picture.He added: "The Indian is doubtless a gentleman, but he is a gentleman who wears a very dirty shirt."
No question: that is not pleasant by modern standards. By contemporary standards, however, it is not entirely out of the way. Even a "liberal" writer like Catharine Maria Sedgwick, whose racial attitudes appear to us far more "advanced" than Bird's, writes in Hope Leslie a story in which English-Native American mixed marriages fail her anti-miscegenation standard. James Fenimore Cooper seems to admire Native Americans only when (as at the end of The Last of the Mohicans) they have come to end of their road and are about to stop being an impediment to "us." William Gilmore Simms establishes clear gender and racial hierarchies in his fictions, justifying both male and white dominance of the world he portrays.
Even Ainsworth, after all, who writes from an English point of view--"BIRD's views on this subject are coloured by national antipathy," he says, with nice English superiority--seems to have forgotten some of his own literary history. For just one instance of what I mean, consider George Walker's 1799 novel The Vagabond. Published in London by an English writer, its central characters leave England for, of all places, Kentucky, scene also of Nick of the Woods. They find it, in a fictional time ten years later than the time Bird depicts, still too primitive, too brutal, and too inhabited by "savages"--the same word Bird uses, by the way--to bear. They hate the place, they hate the natives, they even hate the Anglo settlers; and as a result they leave as fast as they can manage it in order to return to the safety of England.
Context or no context, it is in part the racial attitudes expressed in Bird's best-known fiction that have determined much of what people who know anything about him at all now know. The chance to examine his art offered by this exhibition, however, throws into at least some question precisely what it is we think we "know" about him. A lot of what we show is exhibited here because it illustrates Bird's artistic explorations of a variety of genres: self-portraits and portraits; sketches and more finished paintings of his neighborhood--New Castle, Philadelphia; works done as a tourist, sketching scenes in various places he visits.
But one thing he also does is paint the people whom we are told--and have come to think--he does not like, Native Americans; and he does so in very interesting ways. It seemed to me, as I put this exhibition together, that, like any exhibition, it ought to tell a story. But I found myself uncomfortably juggling two stories, not one, that I wanted this exhibition to tell.
The first is the story of a person who, though known as a playwright and novelist, turns out as well to have been an artist whose work as an artist remains essentially unknown to this day. This show allows a viewer to trace his development as an artist from his 'prentice works in the 1820s through works he dates from 1853, the year before his early death in 1854. These are works with real pleasures.
The almost "formal" watercolor of "Chester Cathedral" startles because it is so unlike what Bird's other (and American) watercolors have taught us to expect. His English scenes generally strike me as quite different from those he painted while on his American travels. They are staid, more polished, less "picturesque"--more careful and less excited. Bird is an artist for whom the American landscape is always new. The exhibit ends, out of chronological order, with a painting from the 1820s, "Twilight from Moonrise," which foreshadows themes Bird would revisit throughout his life of painting. Landscape, water, boats, small figures enjoying the setting in which they are placed--these are constant refrains in his landscapes, objects he almost invariably chooses to depict. The story of Bird's work as an artist is worth attention. Bird the painter is not a new George Caleb Bingham or Frederick Edwin Church. He is an accomplished watercolorist whose works show us a sensitive mind and a good draughtsman encountering America and recording it at a time when we have little enough evidence of what it looked like, how they saw it then, to be grateful for so much new evidence on just this point.
But there is also a second story, that of Bird as observer of Native Americans, and this story, I think, sheds light on what Bird is best known for, his writing, and especially Nick of the Woods. Bird obviously resented the criticisms his racial attitudes received; he did not, it seems, think of himself as a racist. Common enough, as we all have enough contemporary evidence to know--but perhaps not without some force in Bird's case. The Natives he depicts, when he does finished portraits of them, differ in a marked fashion from the natives typical of many contemporary portraits of Native Americans. We show "Brewett. A Celebrated Miami Chief," from J. O. Lewis's Aboriginal Port-Folio, 1835. Typical of its genre, this portrait exemplifies what we might call "the anthropological gaze": it removes its subject from activity and from full-bodied humanity, reducing him to a specimen in a view book: "look how oddly it dresses," the portrait seems to say. Bird's portraits are different. His sketches, to be sure--seven of them are shown as a group--do resemble Lewis's. But they are sketches. In his finished portraits, Bird's Native Americans are people. They do dress differently from "us"; but they are also actors doing their own things, not simply objects for our admiration. Bird may not like them; but in his art they remain people.
I find the interaction between his visual and his verbal art an exciting reason to think again about Bird as a writer. But if this exhibit encourages anyone to think some more about Bird, perhaps even to re-read him (and he is a good read!), then it will have served its purpose. For there really is a third story here: the story of how much a prodigiously profligate culture manages to ignore of its own cultural heritage. But that is a story for another time! For now, enjoy the show.
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