Raphus cucullatus
The Dodo (Raphus cucullatus), also recorded as the Mauritius Dodo, is the subject of this watercolour by Charles Collins, painted in 1736 for the natural history collection assembled by Taylor White.
The Range of the Dodo
The Dodo was endemic to Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean roughly 500 miles east of Madagascar. Despite its heavy, ungainly reputation, it belonged to the pigeon family, Columbidae, and its closest surviving relative is the Nicobar pigeon of South East Asia. Standing around seventy centimetres tall, it was flightless, ground-nesting and, having evolved on an island with no land predators, entirely unafraid of people.
The Extinction of teh Dodo
Dutch sailors recorded the bird in 1598, and within a single human lifetime it was gone. The last widely accepted sighting was in 1662. Hunting by visiting crews played a part, but the more decisive damage came from the animals those crews brought with them. Pigs, rats, macaques and cats took eggs and young from nests on the forest floor, while clearance of the lowland forest removed the habitat the species depended on. The Dodo has since become the defining emblem of human-caused extinction, and the phrase “as dead as a Dodo” has long outlived the bird itself.
The Painting of the Dodo
Collins was working in 1736, some seventy years after the last reliable sighting, so this watercolour cannot have been made from life. Artists of the period depicting the Dodo relied instead on 17th Century paintings, particularly those of Roelandt Savery, on descriptions in published travel accounts, and on the small number of surviving physical remains. The result is a record of how the Dodo was understood in the 18th Century rather than how it appeared in the wild, which is part of what makes such images historically valuable: they preserve the scientific imagination of their moment as much as the animal.
The painting sits within the Taylor White Collection, a body of 18th Century natural history watercolours commissioned by Taylor White (1701 to 1772) and now held by McGill University Library. Collins was among the principal artists White employed, and his work across the collection combines careful observation with the compositional restraint typical of the period. Here that restraint gives the Dodo an unexpected dignity, presenting a bird more often caricatured as a study worth taking seriously.
c.1680 - 1744
Charles Collins (c.1680-1744) was a painter of birds, mammals and still life, born in Dublin and trained in Ireland before establishing himself in London. He built his early reputation on still-life subjects, including a series of fruit studies for Robert Furber's Twelve Months of Fruit (1732), before turning increasingly to natural history illustration. From 1736, Collins worked alongside Peter Paillou to produce watercolours of British birds and mammals for the naturalist and collector Taylor White, contributing over 200 signed works to White's collection. His animal studies are noted for their lifelike composition, typically set against a grassy mound or tree stump rather than a plain background, and for the accuracy with which plumage and colouring were recorded from live or preserved specimens. Collins died in London in 1744, described at the time as Bird Painter to the Royal Society.
Credit: Taylor White Collection, Rare Books & Special Collections, McGill University Library.