Alice's Dodo. Oil on canvas. 35 x 35 inches (90 x 90 cm). $950.
I must have been about five when I first fell in love with the ludicrous, haughty, peevish dodo drawn by Sir John Tenniel in my old-fashioned edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The dodo was so obviously a made-up creature that I found it hard to believe my mother when she insisted he had once been a real bird.
“Then is the Cheshire Cat real?” I asked in confusion. “What about the Mock Turtle?
I suspect dodos weren’t very peevish at all but rather enjoyed a sort of bovine serenity during the 4000 years they grazed through the woods on the island of Mauritius, digesting windfall fruit with the use of gizzard stones and letting their wings atrophy because there were no predators to chase them into the air.
Then Dutch sailors stumbled upon the island in 1598 and ... well, suffice to say that within 64 years there was nothing left of the dodo but a few sketches, anecdotal accounts and very incomplete bone fragments. Two hundred years later, an enterprising schoolmaster went to Mauritius and hired locals to slog through the swamps, groping in the oozing mud with their toes in search of dodo remains. This turned up hundreds of skeletons, and in 1863, just as reports of definitive fossil findings went to press, so did the illustrated Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, making it a pretty big year for dodos.
They had another pretty big year in 2009, when a previously unpublished 17th-century Dutch illustration of a dodo was put up for auction at Christie's with expectations that bids might reach £6,000; it sold for £44,450. I’ve decided to jump on what I’m hoping is the crest of a new dodo craze. I whipped up this painting from a model I saw in London's Natural History Museum. My starting price is $950 but there's always the chance that bids will rush in, taking it to £6,000 then £44,450. I’ll let you know how it goes...
I suspect dodos weren’t very peevish at all but rather enjoyed a sort of bovine serenity during the 4000 years they grazed through the woods on the island of Mauritius, digesting windfall fruit with the use of gizzard stones and letting their wings atrophy because there were no predators to chase them into the air.
Then Dutch sailors stumbled upon the island in 1598 and ... well, suffice to say that within 64 years there was nothing left of the dodo but a few sketches, anecdotal accounts and very incomplete bone fragments. Two hundred years later, an enterprising schoolmaster went to Mauritius and hired locals to slog through the swamps, groping in the oozing mud with their toes in search of dodo remains. This turned up hundreds of skeletons, and in 1863, just as reports of definitive fossil findings went to press, so did the illustrated Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, making it a pretty big year for dodos.
They had another pretty big year in 2009, when a previously unpublished 17th-century Dutch illustration of a dodo was put up for auction at Christie's with expectations that bids might reach £6,000; it sold for £44,450. I’ve decided to jump on what I’m hoping is the crest of a new dodo craze. I whipped up this painting from a model I saw in London's Natural History Museum. My starting price is $950 but there's always the chance that bids will rush in, taking it to £6,000 then £44,450. I’ll let you know how it goes...
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