“Artificial tree-trunk, open,” from Richard Kearton’s Wild Life at Home, 1898. Image via Public Domain Review

• On a sunny spring weekend, I like to go to the park and hide in a false tree trunk I’ve built. There I stand, whiling away the hours and waiting for the birds to come around. I didn’t invent this hobby. Don’t give me that look. There are thousands of people like me. The whole thing started with Richard and Cherry Kearton, turn-of-the-century British nature photographers who went to ingenious lengths to capture their subjects up close. Artifice was their greatest ally, and they weren’t afraid to waste many hours hoping for something to happen. John Bevis writes, “It might stretch credulity for Richard Kearton, a benign man in a benign profession, to be labeled ‘the Machiavelli of bird photography.’ But the fact is that he and his brother, Cherry, adapted a number of the tactics of dell’arte della guerra in their search for ways of going undercover into ‘Birdland’ to secure untainted images of wildlife at home. Between the years 1897 and 1903, their experiments included variations on such quasi-military techniques as the smoke screen, in which surprise through deception is achieved by camouflage; the feigned retreat, when a false sense of security leads the foe into ambush; the Trojan horse, famously gaining admittance to a restricted area under false pretenses; and further ploys under the catch-all heading of misinformation … In 1898 came the ‘Artificial tree-trunk,’ anticipating by nearly twenty years the observation trees, made of angle-iron and camouflaged with bark, that were used by the British and French on the Western Front. The Kearton tree was a pantomime prop-like contraption whose wigwam frame of bamboo uprights was dressed with mesh, and covered with fabric camouflaged with paint, moss, and lichen. The photographer stood to attention inside, pressed against his camera, whose tripod legs could be only partially spread. It may have lacked versatility, but when it came to photographing a bird perched six feet above ground level, in woodland, the dummy tree trunk was hard to beat.”

• The Jewish Museum has dedicated an exhibition to Florine Stettheimer, a Jazz Age painter who remains, in Christopher Benfey’s view, far too often unsung: “Through her closely observant work, we are granted entrée to exclusive birthday celebrations (with her pals Marcel Duchamp and Alfred Stieglitz recognizably in attendance), Fourth of July fireworks over Manhattan, and a frenzied spring sale at Bendel’s, though it might as well be Bruegel’s. Her signature filigrees of paint, especially red (associated at the time with the Ballets-Russes, for which Stettheimer dreamed of designing costumes, as well as with the Russian Revolution) and layer-cake-icing white, add a frothy dynamism to the festivities. Despite the apparent frivolity of her subjects, Stettheimer … was an ambitious, deadly serious artist who has never gotten the attention she deserves. Her varied, probing self-portraits—palette in hand and red shoes on her feet, accompanied by a Nijinsky-ish faun; or floating in space on a magical red cape, like some exotic deity; or reclining in the nude, à la Olympia—convey a sophisticated self-awareness of the confining assumptions facing a hardworking woman artist between the wars.”

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