Ornithological Drawings

The Strasbourg painter and draughtsman Johann Walter was born in Strasbourg in 1604, trained in the workshop of Friedrich Brentel (1580-1651) and joined the service of Count Jean de Nassau-Idstein after 1600. The latter, the owner of the Renaissance style Schloss Idstein, was a collector of bird specimens, some of them imported at great expense from the New World. He asked Johann Walter to make naturalistic drawings from his plant and bird specimens. The 20 resulting bird drawings are kept in the Strasbourg Prints and Drawings Room. The species are both local and exotic, drawn in a very realistic style and accompanied by their names, both the everyday and the Latin ones. They are set against a white background, generally without leaves, branches or perches. The Albertina Museum in Vienna possesses a comparable series, but with a greater variety of  bird species. In addition to these individual drawings, Walter also produced collective compositions, blithely mingling European and foreign birds, with the different species grouped together in imaginary situations.