“Along Appleby Line - Early Spring, Blue Bird”
Robert Bateman
Painting
Acrylic on Board
20 x 36 in.
1982
Provenance
One private collection, Ontario., 1982 - present
Beckett Gallery, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 1982
SOLD
This painting was exhibited in a number of public gallery exhibitions:
California Academy of Sciences, 1983
St. Louis Museum of Science & Natural History 1984
Portraits of Nature – Paintings by Robert Bateman held at The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., January – May 1987 (published in the exhibition catalogue)
ROBERT BATEMAN’S THOUGHTS ON THIS PAINTING:
The eastern bluebird is found in most of settled North America east of the Rockies. The population increased after the coming of white man and the clearing of the forests. The bluebird likes open country with scattered trees and woodlots. It is a bird of 'edge conditions', the edge of a field and a forest. When I was a boy, bluebirds were much commoner in our area than they are now. A sighting now is a special event. There are different theories for their scarcity today. One is that clearing of land is more complete with steel rather than wooden fence posts. Another is that starlings and house sparrows, which also nest in holes, have competed for nesting sites, and being more aggressive, have beaten out the bluebirds. There is also the theory that pesticides in modern agriculture have brought down the population.
In my mind, I associate bluebirds with early spring and our pioneer forefathers. This is why I thought it suitable to place this bird on a pump handle. In my area, there are still farms that were built over a hundred years ago. In some cases, the house and barn have been torn down or burned down, and the pump is all that is standing as a relic of our past. I have tried to capture one of those soft, damp days of early spring, when the snow patches are retreating and the puddles are advancing.
