333 Birds

Book excerpt: Peter Vos (1935-2010) was an imaginative draftsman who left behind an oeuvre in which the imagination reigns supreme. He was an avid reader and his life with literature stimulated his creativity. He was also fascinated by birds: by their appearance and behavior. To record our feathered companions, he kept bird diaries with notes and sketches. In '333 Birds' he transformed those drawings into a whole that is a test of his skills as a bird artist. It is a high point in his work and in the genre and was created between August 1980 and the end of December 1981. He found the reproduced specimens in Artis, Blijdorp, Wassenaar, Antwerp and in a bird sanctuary near Slimbridge (England).0Vos loved drawing in dummies and for '333 Birds' he chose a part from the Privé-domein series by De Arbeiderspers with letters from Gustave Flaubert under the title 'Haat is een deugd' (1979). The soft, tinted paper provides a perfect background for his diligently reproduced bird population.0In this edition, the marked pages of this dummy, acquired in 2017 by the Fondation Custodia in Paris, are reproduced as a facsimile, accompanied by a cahier with introductory texts by Siegfried Woldhek, himself a draftsman and former chairman of the Vogelbescherming Nederland, Jan Piet Filedt Kok and Ger Luijten.