Frank W. Benson, Flying Bufflehead, 1930

With ornithological accuracy and an understanding of the mechanism of avian flight plus a rare ability to convey a sense of motion, Flying Bufflehead is an appealing example of the subject most identified with Frank Benson.

Benson was a member of The Ten American Painters, a group of important artists who were inspired by the works of the French impressionists. Benson’s portraits and paintings of leisure activities at the turn of the twentieth century remain extremely popular images of a bygone era. In his later paintings and prints of wildlife, however, Benson expressed his profound relationship with nature. As the founder and continued leader of the American school of the “sporting print,” the origins of Benson’s art form are to be found in his early life in Massachusetts where he grew up hunting and fishing. Indeed, many of Benson’s prints show the hunt, while others display the pure vitality of his animal subjects. It is this concentration on vitality that distinguishes his wildlife prints from ornithological studies. Faith Andrews Bedford writes,

Using the language of the etcher’s needle, Benson transformed the observations of nearly five decades of hunting and fishing into exquisitely rendered depictions of wildfowl. His birds are never static creatures; rather, their motion is vital and crisp. Viewing a collection of his prints, one can almost hear the whir of feathers as a flock of ducks descends to a marsh, the cacophonous honking and slapping of wings at the moment of touchdown. In plates of birds on the water, reeds and rushes appear to bend and sway while ducks silently glide through them. The heavy beating of wings as a goose surges upward is almost palpable; the whole effect is charged with energy not only observed, but also felt. The atmosphere is always alive with an open-air breeziness. One can almost feel the wind that rushes beneath the wings of a hawk carrying him ever higher for the perfect vantage point.

Benson’s prints were critically acclaimed and enormously popular in his time, sought after by European as well as American collectors. In fact, he had difficulty supplying the demand for his prints. In a letter to Albert Milch, a New York gallery owner, his daughter Sylvia writes:

“We are not exactly happy over the etching question ourselves. A sudden increase in the demand last year used up our stock in a month. This year they have been mostly sold in a week, apparently. Out of an edition of l50, we keep 25 to sell at advance prices when the first l25 are sold. Every agent but one or two has already wired or written for more prints and they are all issued except about 5 sets which I can sell ten times over. I am trying to take care of old customers, but the thing is beyond me.”

 According to Faith Andrews Bedford, however taxing the work, Benson secretly rejoiced at the success of his prints as it freed him from the work of portrait commissions.

Refs.: Bedford, Faith Andrews, The Sporting Art of Frank W. Benson; Ordeman, John T., Frank W. Benson’s Etchings, Drypoints and Lithographs, p. 177, Pl. #135.