I send for your amusement a few attempts at some of our indigenous birds, hoping that your good nature will excuse their deficiencies, while you point them out to me.... They were chiefly coloured by candle-light. I have now got my collection of native birds considerably enlarged, and shall endeavor, if possible, to obtain all the smaller ones this summer. Be pleased to mark on the drawings, with a pencil, the names of each bird, as, except three or four, I do not know them.
Alex Wilson
AFTER AN ENGRAVING BY W H. LIZARS, FROM A PAINTING BY JAMES CRAW.
Will. Bartram
REPRODUCED FROM "CASSINIA" FOR 1906.
Wilson, practically self-taught in everything, with no experience or training in drawing from nature, thus began at the age of thirty-eight to make his drawings of birds, before he knew the names of his subjects, and twenty years before Audubon's talents were known to any but members of his own family and a few intimate friends. The only aid in drawing which Wilson ever received appears to have come from the hints which Lawson supplied. Nevertheless, the best of Alexander Wilson's original drawings represent a degree of excellence and honest workmanship of which he had no need to be ashamed, and in many instances he owed far less to his engraver, Alexander Lawson, than did his great rival to Robert Havell.