Читать книгу Art of the New Naturalists: A Complete History - Peter Marren - Страница 17

It was probably the striking jacket of British Game that settled the argument about whether to use photographs or artwork for the New Naturalist dust jackets. On 7 December 1944, William Collins professed himself ‘absolutely delighted with the partridge for British Game. I think it is quite lovely in every way’ (wc to CE, 7.12.44). He was commenting on the artists’ ‘rough’, twice the size of the printed jacket and against a grey background. On the finished design, sent in on 24 January, the artists substituted ‘umber brown’ for grey. Collins preferred the rough and hoped that they ‘would some day … be able to use the original colour scheme on another design’.

This is a bolder, more confident jacket than Butterflies. An approximately life-size English partridge dominates the scene, its head twisted back above the title band, perhaps in tribute to the old masters of bird portraiture who showed large birds in this awkward attitude in order to fit them on the plate without reduction. The partridge is running towards the spine over an open down, its body language and alert eye (beautifully observed) suggesting alarm. Several birds in its covey have already taken off – wispy, almost abstract shapes on the left front and spine – and our bird will doubtless follow them shortly. The glory of the design lies in the colours: the ochre, terracotta and pale grey create a sepia-tinted landscape, a timeless vision of the old England of rolling hills, hedgerows, weed-fringed arable fields and abundant game that, in the immediate postwar period, might have caused a twinge of nostalgia.

Copies of the jacket exist where the design has been mistakenly repeated on the back against an umber background. Possibly they were rejects brought in for the last remaining stocks of British Game in the late 1950s or 1960s to avoid the expense of printing a new batch.

This jacket gave Collins the idea of a ‘big illustration-book of individual birds on the lines of Gould’ which he wanted James Fisher to write and Clifford Ellis to illustrate. He was still talking about it a month after the jacket was accepted, and a month is a long time in publishing.

Artwork for British Game, 1945. The hand-lettered title and colophon were designed separately and combined by the printer.