Portrait of Passenger Pigeon

Maine State Museum

The date of the painting is uncertain, but it’s believed it was painted in the 1850‘s by a student of John Cloudman, from a posed taxidermy mount of a passenger pigeon "...Sylvester Beckett, the organization’s secretary, had loaned the shopworn bird, after much entreaty, to his friend John Cloudman, the painter, who posed it on a branch before a portrait of the Exchange as a still life for his students". ¹

Sometime later the passenger Pigeon portrait was donated to the Portland Society of Natural history and hung in the Museum’s Main Stairway.

¹ A Circular to Sea Captains and Other Seafaring Men from the Portland Society of Natural History, 1881. http://maineaudubon.org/about/history-achievements/first-150-years/

Note: During the various stages of conservation treatment Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr., Maine State Historian, Deanna S. Bonner-Ganter, Curator The Maine State Museum and Sheila McDonald, Deputy Museum Director came to the studio to confer about the treatment and share the historical context in relationship to the conservation process. The general consensus was to leave the edges partially untreated and leave most of the historical evidence (drips, stains) untouched.