Alcedo atthis
This 18th Century watercolour of the Common Kingfisher (Alcedo atthis) is the work of Peter Paillou, one of the natural history painters whose studies form the Taylor White Collection. Painted from close observation at a time when few people would ever have seen the bird at rest, it records the kingfisher’s colouring with a precision that photography would not match for another century.
Description of the Kingfisher
The Common Kingfisher is a small bird of freshwater margins, found across Europe, Asia, northern Africa and the Middle East. It favours slow-moving rivers, lakes and streams where small fish are plentiful, and is most often glimpsed as a flash of blue low over the water rather than seen properly at all. Adults measure roughly 16 to 19 cm in length, with a wingspan of 25 to 30 cm. The male carries a brilliant azure-blue back and head; the female’s upperparts tend more towards green. Both sexes share the same warm orange underparts, the contrast that makes the species so immediately recognisable.
Much of that colour is structural rather than pigmented. The blue of the back shifts between azure and near-turquoise depending on the angle of the light, which is precisely the difficulty a painter working in watercolour must resolve, and one reason a still, deliberate study of this kind carries information a fleeting sighting cannot.
The Kingfisher’s Hunting and Breeding Practices
The kingfisher hunts from a perch overhanging the water, waiting with unusual patience before diving headfirst to take small fish, aquatic insects and crustaceans in its long, dagger-like bill. Nesting takes place underground: pairs excavate a tunnel into a soft riverbank, at the end of which the female lays five to seven eggs. Breeding runs from roughly March to August, with both parents sharing incubation over some nineteen to twenty-one days.
Paillou worked in a period when British natural history illustration was moving from decorative convention towards genuine scientific record, and his birds sit firmly on the observational side of that shift. Plumage, posture and the set of the bill are all treated as things to be reported accurately rather than arranged for effect. The result is a study that still reads as a reliable likeness some two and a half centuries after it was made, and one that holds its own as a piece of drawing quite apart from its documentary value.
c.1720 - c.1790
Peter Paillou (c.1712-1782) was a natural history painter of Huguenot descent, born in London to a family that had emigrated from France in the previous century. He trained under the London painter Jacob Tribble before establishing himself as an animal and bird painter. Following Charles Collins's death in 1744, Paillou took over as the principal artist for the naturalist and collector Taylor White, contributing well over 100 signed watercolours of birds, mammals and reptiles, with many more attributed to him on stylistic grounds. He continued to paint for other patrons throughout his career, including the naturalist Thomas Pennant, whose zoological illustrations Paillou supplied for British Zoology and Arctic Zoology, and was later elected a member of the Society of Artists, exhibiting watercolours of birds in London. Paillou died in 1782.
Credit: Taylor White Collection, Rare Books & Special Collections, McGill University Library.