Migrating Starlings

At about 90 centimetres high and a metre and a half wide, this is one of Niestlé's largest canvases, signed and dated at the lower right, J.B. NIESTLÉ 1910. The German national biography names it among his principal works. A year later he took up the subject again in Flight of Starlings, now in the Museum of Art and History in his native Neuchâtel, which also holds part of his estate. In late summer and autumn starlings gather in huge flocks before many of them leave for milder winter grounds, and the title catches them on the move. In the moors between the Loisach river and Lake Kochel, near the village where he lived from 1910, Niestlé recorded the bird life so closely that Sindelsdorf now cites his pictures as evidence of species that have since vanished from its moor.