Jakob Bogdani's Stuffed Titmouse: Birds, Still-Life Painting, and the Global Imaginary

This article analyzes two paintings by Jakob Bogdani, of the exotic aviaries of Admiral Churchill at Little Park, Windsor, between 1708 and 1710. In it, I argue that by following Bodgani's development from a painter of traditional still lifes to an innovative painter of exotic birds, we can trace the emergence of new rhetorical strategies, in which English colonial expansion and global trade are made to seem natural, agentless, and uncontested. These same strategies are evident in Alexander Pope's Windsor-Forest, written at the same time, about the same geographic space. While it appears to have been replaced by a simple, celebratory dynamic, the central tension of the still-life genre (or nature morte in French) between vivification and decay continues to animate Bogdani's bird paintings. Morte continues to shadow nature, through the appearance of two native British birds, a titmouse and a bullfinch, which he painted from dead specimens. Their appearance troubles the glorification of global expansion on display in these canvases, reminding viewers of the violence and death that underwrote European expansion into colonial territories. I argue that Bogdani's birds are uneasily suspended between the objects of earlier still-life paintings, and the subjects of later nature painting, and that in attending to their ungainly or uncanny aspects, we can see the outlines of a global Enlightenment.