From the Archives: Roger Tory Peterson — Artist at Work

Editor’s Note: After publishing his first field guide, Roger Tory Peterson signed on as Audubon’s education director and the magazine’s art director—and went on to illustrate 42 of its covers. In this feature from Audubon’s November-December 1942 issue, renowned naturalist, author, and photographer Edwin Way Teale combines a portrait of the artist with documentation—in words and photos—of his process for researching and illustrating the geese featured on that issue’s cover.

Roger Tory Peterson—to borrow an expression from the sporting page—is a triple-threat ornithologist. He is an artist, a lecturer, a writer. By his paintings and photographs, by his illustrated lectures, by his pamphlets, articles and books, he broadcasts his enthusiasm for birds.

That enthusiasm has been burning steadily for nearly a quarter of a century. During recent days, while I have been following him about like some photographic Boswell to record on film the successive steps in creating this issue’s cover, he has told me of this long fascination and how it began.

Roger Peterson was born in the western New York manufacturing city of Jamestown on August 28, 1908. He was not, he is free to admit, a model little boy. Regimentation rubbed him the wrong way. The do-it-because-you-are-told-do-it rules of the Jamestown school system fed his non-conformity. He still holds the dubious distinction of having been spanked oftener in Sixth Grade than any other boy in the history of his school. Seven times in one term, he trudged down the Via Dolorosa to the principal’s office. The bill of particulars against him ranged from dropping a match in the dry grass of a lawn to climbing down the fire escape instead of marching two-by-two along the hall in the prescribed Noah’s Ark manner.

In the second half of the Seventh Grade, a sudden change came over him. His science teacher, Miss Hornbeck, organized a Junior Audubon Club and obtained leaflets which turned his attention to nature. It was, a good many people agreed, a great day for Jamestown.

His initial interest in birds can be accounted for best, he believes, by the fact that they were symbols of freedom in his maladjusted youth. They could move about, fly away, escape from restrictions. Beyond the age of eleven, the outdoor world formed the hub about which his life revolved. Although the great dates of history refuse to stick in his mind, he still can recall the exact date of every bird trip he made during the first five or six years of his enthusiasm. He remembers his grandmother’s birthday, for example, by recalling that it was on that day of the year that he saw his first cardinal!

In the beginning, he was absorbed in everything pertaining to the out-of-doors. Soon, the carpets in the Peterson home developed bulges and began to crackle when walked upon. Roger was pressing hundreds of plants by placing them between newspapers and tucking them under the carpets. One Saturday, he and a school-companion started off on a botanical “big day.” They identified 250 wild plants before they returned home at dusk.

Then Peterson plunged into entomology. He memorized hundreds of scientific names from a price list put out by Ward’s Natural Science Establishment. He collected, one summer, 200 swallowtail caterpillars. Supplying their favorite food–pipe-vine leaves–kept him on the run for weeks on end. During the winter he brought home 800 Promethea moth cocoons. The vast horde of fluttering insects emerged in the spring and laid their eggs on his mother’s curtains. On several nights he became so engrossed in capturing moths about street lamps that he failed to put in an appearance until morning. And, on one occasion, he appeared triumphantly at the kitchen door with two baby skunks he had caught in a butterfly net.

From the time he encountered the first Audubon leaflet, he had been trying to draw. At frequent intervals he used to pull a little express wagon down to the public library and haul home the two big volumes of “The Birds of New York” to study the illustrations by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. His first bird drawing, a colorful sideview of a blue-jay, received the praise of the teacher in school. But, through a mixup, it was credited not to Peterson but to another pupil. A little later, however, he came into his own. The Buffalo Times offered a cash prize for the best drawing sent in by one of its younger readers. The banded purple butterfly Peterson submitted brought him two dollars. His father was dubious about the achievement however. For, in making the drawing on rough paper, Roger had ruined a five-dollar pen to win a two-dollar prize. The pen was his father’s.

Throughout high school, he took all the art courses offered. Jamestown, because of its extensive furniture factories, is known as the “Grand Rapids of the East.” In one of these plants, Peterson obtained work painting designs on cabinets. In this way he earned money for an eventful trip to the A.O.U. convention in New York City in 1925. There the seventeen-year-old boy met men he had been reading about for years: Dr. Arthur A. Allen, Dr. Frank M. Chapman, Dr. Robert Cushman Murphy, Ludlow Griscom. The great Fuertes gave him one of his brushes and offered to make suggestions if he would send him some of his sketches. In one day, on a trip with Ludlow Griscom to Long Beach, L. I., he added thirteen new birds to his life list. He returned home with only eight cents in his pocket but completely happy.

Two years later, he was back in New York, beginning his art career in earnest. Mornings he attended classes at the Art Students’ League and afternoons he earned his expenses by painting little Chinamen on lacquered cabinets in a downtown furniture shop. Weekends he roamed the fields and woods with a remarkable and energetic group of young ornithologists known as the Bronx County Bird Club. Out of that small society have come such well-known bird-men as Allan D. Cruickshank, National Audubon Society photographer and lecturer, Roger T. Peterson, and Joseph Hickey, of the Wildlife Management department of the University of Wisconsin. During the five years he was at the Art Students’ League and the National Academy of Design, Peterson was increasing his knowledge of birds.

During the next three years, while teaching art and science at the Rivers School, at Brookline, Mass., he labored evenings over a new kind of bird guide, a streamlined volume which emphasized the predominant field marks. As “A Field Guide to the Birds” this standard work is familiar to all. More than 40,000 copies are in use. USO army-camp libraries include the volume; every Hudson Bay post carries it in stock; virtually every eastern college that teaches ornithology uses it in the classroom. Seven years after publication, it is selling at the rate of 6,000 copies every twelve months.

Yet Peterson went from publisher to publisher with his manuscript. He was turned down by five leading companies before Houghton Mifflin, of Boston, decided to gamble on the book. It was considered such a risk that the print-order was for only 2,000 copies and the contract stipulated that the author should receive no royalty at all on the first 1,000.

In two weeks, the 2,000 copies were gone. All during the following month of May, orders poured in which could not be filled. Before the year’s end, the publishers realized they had one of those rare “bread-and-butter” books that sell year after year without any pushing. Peterson’s more recent companion-volume, “A Field Guide to Western Birds,” required 20,000 miles of travel and three and a half years of work to complete.

The same year his first guide book appeared, 1934, he joined the administrative staff of the National Audubon Society where he was assigned the task of rewriting the very leaflets which, years before, turned the current of his life into its present channel. In the past several years, Peterson has prepared and illustrated more than a hundred and sixty of these leaflets. They cover more than eighty different species of birds. These interest-stimulators have gone to well over 1,000,000 school children.

In 1936, Peterson married Mildred Warner Washington. They met at the first session of the Audubon Nature Camp, where Roger was head instructor in birds. Among the scientific clubs of which Peterson is a member are the Linnaean Society of New York, the Nuttall Club of Cambridge, Mass., and the American Ornithologists Union. He became an associate member of the latter in 1925 and was elected to full membership in 1935. At the time, he was the youngest man who enjoyed full membership. Other vital statistics include the following:

He has lectured on birds in twenty-two different states. He has drawn more than 700 species of birds. He has photographed 130 species. His life-list now includes between 850 and 900 species and sub-species. He has watched birds in every state in the Union except one–South Dakota. Last summer, he was within fifty miles of this commonwealth but decided to leave it for the future so there still would be “someplace new to go to.”

As a bird painter, Peterson has improved steadily so that at the present time he is doing some of his finest work. It is this capacity for methodical growth, for sustained and intense enthusiasm, which is an outstanding characteristic of his. He hasn’t stopped growing. And that is what makes his future as full of interesting possibilities as his past is full of interesting accomplishments.

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First Spread (Above) 

Photo 1: This photographic essay by Edwin Way Teale shows how Roger Peterson makes one of his drawings—in this case the one reproduced on our cover (below). Sketching the captive snow geese at the waterfowl pond in the Bronx Zoo, Mr. Peterson works rapidly, catching action and gesture in a few simple lines. Details are not bothered with at this early stage. Field sketching is more satisfactory than making up poses and postures out of whole cloth within the studio.

Photo 2: Pulling out the long, flat, camphor-reeking trays at the American Museum of Natural History, Mr. Peterson selects a snow goose or two to work from. They will be used for reference, but cannot be copied literally, as there is nothing deader-looking than a bird skin. Some bird artists collect their own specimens for painting, but in a large city where there is a museum this is seldom necessary. The goose in Mr. Peterson’s hand was collected in Wisconsin forty years ago.

Photo 3: Although two snow geese and one blue goose have been decided upon for the drawing, a dozen positions have been sketched on the rough paper and the sketch-pad. Like paper dolls they are cut out, then placed in different combinations until a satisfactory arrangement is arrived at. The other cutouts are filed away for the future. Sometimes the clippings are shuffled around and studied for an hour or more before the basic design is determined. This is really the most creative stage of the drawing. Some artists give too little attention to composition, scattering their figures too much, giving them no relation to one another.

Photos 4 & 5: Since it is easier to work in a larger size, the composition is scaled up on a piece of tracing paper by means of squares and transferred to illustration boards.

Second Spread (Above) 

Photo 1: Clutching the blue goose firmly and closely studying its bill structure, our artist perfects the drawing. Faults of draughtsmanship are corrected, details added. Most covers are done at Audubon House, but if time is pressing, Mr. Peterson finishes them at night in his home studio.

Photos 2: For this work a hard sharp-pointed pencil is used, one that gives definite, crisp details. For the rough-action sketches a softer pencil was employed. A former student of the master teacher, Kimon Nicolaides, Mr. Peterson feels out contours much the way he was taught years ago at the Art Students’ League, in N.Y.C.

Photo 3: Before settling down to the serious business of painting, our artist consults his “morgue” in which he keeps a thousand and one odds and ends for reference. Here he is examining a folder marked “marsh vegetation.” As there are no marshes on Fifth Avenue, these files are a valuable aid in suggesting a background for the geese, and for many another painting.

Photo 4: To many people the halfway stages of a painting reveal more of the technique of the artist—more of the labor pains—than when it is finished. Whatever vitality the drawing has, is not obscured by distracting detail. Using Chinese ink for the darks, and opaque white for the whites, the simple blocks of tone are laid down with a red sable brush. In this drawing, the gray back of a piece of illustration board was used instead of the usual rough white of Whatman’s water color paper.

Third Spread (Above)

Photo 1: Finishing up the painting is fun, but whatever faults or successes it has are inherent in the earlier stages. No amount of “tickling up” will cover up bad draughtsmanship. The background of blue is laid on with a large brush. In this instance two tries were made before the right blue was found. The first coat jumped too much and did not stay behind the geese. For the sake of economy, covers of Audubon Magazine are limited to two colors—black and one other. That is why such gaudy morsels as the painted bunting never appear on our covers. There are two ways of using the second color; one, as a solid block of tone behind the birds as in this painting; the other, to introduce it into the bird (such as the red throat of a Rose-breasted Grosbeak). A bluebird would be out of the question for it would require three printings—blue, red, and black. Some day we hope to find a way to use more colors without too much cost.

Photo 2: Mr. Peterson drops in at the engravers’ shop to give the proofs the once over. There is still time to make small changes before the magazine goes to press. Rarely are changes necessary, for a good engraver anticipates the artist’s demands.