Rex Brasher
 

Rex Brasher never veered from the lifelong ambition he first formulated at the age of 10 to draw all the birds of North America.  Born in July 1869, the son of amateur ornithologist & taxidermist, Philip Marston Brasher, he was descended from a prominent French Huguenot family. 

He spent the major part of his life perfecting his drawings. Throughout the years, he roamed North America sketching birds.   In 1907, Brasher met the famous bird painter, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, at American Museum of Natural History, and they became good friends. Fuertes was very influential in the development of Brasher’s artistic range and technique. In 1911 Rex bought a 150 acre farm in Connecticut, the Chickadee Valley, with the $700 proceeds from a sale of book illustrations. Then, in 1928, almost 100 years after the publication of Audubon’s Birds of America, Brasher finished his paintings, which he considered the completion of the work begun by John James Audubon.

It was truly a magnificent survey of the birds of North America based on 44 years of dedicated toil and sketching in the field. Dwarfing Audubon’s previous record of 489 species, it illustrated over 2500 figures of birds on 864 plates, with birds in different states of plumage and development. Listed were 1200 species and sub-species of birds according to the American Ornithologists Union (AOU) Checklist of North American Birds. 

After he had an estimate of $500,000 for the printing of his work, and in a manner which would not produce the colors with the accuracy desired, he made the monumental decision to hand color all the copies himself.   After six months of toil, when Brasher had finished a hundred copies of the first volume, he realized that completion of the planned edition of 500 copies within his lifetime was impossible given his age of 60.

The edition was cut to around 100 copies, for which he had 95 subscribers at a cost of $2,400 for each set. Sadly, the Great Depression intervened and 60 cancellations ensued, though the subscription level gradually rose again to 75, and included many tycoons of the day such as William Boeing and Paul Mellon, the banker. The majority of the volumes were printed in collotype by the Meriden Gravure Co. a printer of black and white reproductions, with the photogravures made from the original plates then individually hand colored by Brasher using an airbrush and a complex stenciling process similar to pochoir. His niece Marie wrote the text, which was published by the New Milford Times. The Brewer-Cantelmo Company of New York, still in business, made the bindings in a three hole portfolio style and the work was assembled in a barn on the Chickadee Valley Farm. In fact, it was entirely a cottage industry of the type practiced by printers and publishers of the past, including Benjamin Fawcett, the great English publisher. It was only two years before his death that failing eyesight stopped his lifetime’s work and Rex Brasher died in 1960 at the age of 91 on his farm. There is no other American bird illustrator who has come even close to his monumental achievement and he surely ranks as not only one of the most gifted, but also one of the most underappreciated of all the great bird artists. We believe that he has yet to take his true place in the history of bird illustration.

Originally exhibited in 1932 at the English Book Shop in New York City, the State of Connecticut bought the Brasher collection for $74,000 in 1941 and today it is housed today at the University of Connecticut’s Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.  His  Prints have become highly collectible over the years.    Each print measures 18 inches long by 12 inches wide  

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Only 100 sets of this work were made.

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