An Eye for Nature
The Life and Art of
WILLIAM T. COOPER
WILLIAM T. COOPER
Penny Olsen
"Open the pages of a book illustrated by William T. Cooper and birds fly out, fruits beg to be eaten and landscapes beckon"
Photo: Sarah Scragg
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David Attenborough, natural history documentary-maker and art collector, called William T. Cooper ‘the best ornithological illustrator alive’. How could a boy who grew up in a scrap-built squat on the outskirts of an industrial city reach such heights? That was one of many aspects of Cooper’s life that made it such a joy to write his biography - An Eye for Nature: The Life and Art of William T. Cooper, published by the National Library of Australia.
Bill, as he preferred to be known off canvas, grew up in Newcastle. Despite their meager means his parents fostered his love of nature and art. His mother bought him drawing materials and, while she shopped, would leave him in the library to pore over John Gould’s Birds of Australia; his father taught him to respect the wonders of the bush. |
Bill and Wendy after receiving their Honorary Doctorates at ANU in Dec 2014. Photo by David Parer
Still, Bill’s path to wildlife art was far from smooth. School captain in primary school, he dropped out of high school, having defiantly thrown his exercise books, their pages bordered with sketches, off the top of a cliff. Teenage taxidermist, delivery boy, amateur boxer, ballroom dancer, window dresser, contrary conscript, tie salesman and landscape painter were just some of his incarnations.
Finding his niche as a wildlife painter provided Bill with an entree into a life of adventure, exploration, discovery and unique experiences of the natural world. All along his journey, he has met exceptional individuals, experts and dignitaries, and people living extraordinary lives. He’s travelled through India, east Africa, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia and, of course, Australia, in search of birds, meeting big game hunters, film makers, scientists, royalty, writers and artists.
Bill’s partnership with his wife Wendy is remarkable on many levels, not least their collaborations on three books on rainforest fruits, researched over two decades and covering thousands of species. His other long-term collaborator is ornithologist Joseph Forshaw. Over 40 years, they have produced 15 weighty monographs on birds, beginning with Parrots of the World, published in 1973. Their most recent book, Australian Pigeons and Doves has just been released
Finding his niche as a wildlife painter provided Bill with an entree into a life of adventure, exploration, discovery and unique experiences of the natural world. All along his journey, he has met exceptional individuals, experts and dignitaries, and people living extraordinary lives. He’s travelled through India, east Africa, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia and, of course, Australia, in search of birds, meeting big game hunters, film makers, scientists, royalty, writers and artists.
Bill’s partnership with his wife Wendy is remarkable on many levels, not least their collaborations on three books on rainforest fruits, researched over two decades and covering thousands of species. His other long-term collaborator is ornithologist Joseph Forshaw. Over 40 years, they have produced 15 weighty monographs on birds, beginning with Parrots of the World, published in 1973. Their most recent book, Australian Pigeons and Doves has just been released
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Less known are Bill’s landscapes and seascapes, which earned him a living in his early thirties and which he returned to recently. That talent never went to waste — it is evident in the settings for his paintings of all sorts of wildlife, many published for the first time in his biography: thylacines emerging from a tall Tasmanian forest; a family of numbats occupying a log in a dry Western Australian woodland; and a gloriously displaying bird of paradise with a backdrop of the lush New Guinea highlands.
Red Tails
In the 1970s, while Bill was working on Parrots of the World, he painted 14 hours a day, seven days a week. He says it was never a chore and, every now and then, he would take a week off and ‘head bush’. At 80, Bill was still working six or so hours a day. He left the studio less often because he felt the need to paint. But he and Wendy still made regular excursions, most often northwards and inland.
Wherever he was, Bill was always on the lookout for fresh compositions or picture stories. He meticulously researched each portrait, finding just the right habitat, food item or perfectly curved branch. He leant towards the more colourful birds with big personalities, which make dramatic natural portraits — parrots, birds of paradise, hornbills, kingfishers and fairy-wrens. These subjects set him apart from the grand traditions of North American and European animal portraiture, which had their roots in hunting and other sports (bears, tigers, gamebirds and racehorses). Yet, in effect, Bill has blended those artistic traditions with the great attention to detail and accuracy required of strictly scientific illustrators. As a result, he revitalised the nineteenth-century artistry of the big bird books of John James Audubon and Gould.
Wherever he was, Bill was always on the lookout for fresh compositions or picture stories. He meticulously researched each portrait, finding just the right habitat, food item or perfectly curved branch. He leant towards the more colourful birds with big personalities, which make dramatic natural portraits — parrots, birds of paradise, hornbills, kingfishers and fairy-wrens. These subjects set him apart from the grand traditions of North American and European animal portraiture, which had their roots in hunting and other sports (bears, tigers, gamebirds and racehorses). Yet, in effect, Bill has blended those artistic traditions with the great attention to detail and accuracy required of strictly scientific illustrators. As a result, he revitalised the nineteenth-century artistry of the big bird books of John James Audubon and Gould.
Bill's extraordinary paintings, at the intersection between art and science, stand as a remarkable legacy of a well-lived, productive life.
During the decade or so that I knew him, Bill has often complained that he would like to paint larger, looser work, but that he found himself, before the easel, following the same formula, arranging a pair of birds in a delicately rendered landscape, and solving technical problems as he has always done. In response, I can only echo the words of the wife of another wildlife artist, who wrote of Bill’s frustrations: ‘Only the painter knows how his work falls short of his hopes. The rest of us are dazzled and delighted’.
Dr Penny Olsen is an Associate Professor
Division of Evolution, Ecology and Genetics in the Research School of Biology at the Australian National University
Division of Evolution, Ecology and Genetics in the Research School of Biology at the Australian National University