Pavo cristatus
The peacock, Pavo cristatus, is one of the most immediately recognisable birds in the world, and one of the few whose appearance has been shaped as much by human admiration as by natural selection. Peter Paillou’s watercolour captures the male in full ornamental splendour, painted at a time when European naturalists were working to record exotic species with a new level of accuracy.
The Peacock’s Range
Strictly speaking, the subject is the Indian Peafowl. “Peacock” refers to the male of the species, while the female is the peahen. Native to the Indian subcontinent, where it has been kept and revered for millennia, the bird was carried across the world by trade and by the fashion for ornamental collections. Introduced and feral populations are now established in parts of Europe, southern Africa and Australia.
The male’s plumage is the reason for that global journey. The neck and breast carry an iridescent blue that shifts with the angle of the light, an effect produced not by pigment but by the microscopic structure of the feathers themselves. The famous train, often mistaken for a tail, is formed from greatly elongated upper tail coverts marked with the ocelli, or eyespots, that give the display its character. Raised and fanned during courtship, the train can exceed the length of the bird’s body.
Paillou worked as a bird painter in Britain during the middle decades of the 18th Century and was among the artists whose watercolours form the Taylor White Collection. The collection, assembled by the naturalist and lawyer Taylor White and now held by McGill University Library, records birds, mammals and plants with a directness that belongs to natural history rather than decoration. Each subject is set plainly against the page, observed rather than staged.
That restraint is what gives the peacock study its quality. A bird so often reduced to spectacle is here treated as a specimen: measured, particular, and rendered with real attention to the structure beneath the colour.
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.