Water Pipit

Around 1907 Niestlé found his models in two painters of animals in their own surroundings, the Swiss bird painter Léo-Paul Robert and the Swede Bruno Liljefors. From 1908 he turned to large bird pictures and prepared them with long studies in the open, using photography to help. This canvas belongs to that first run and is signed and dated at the lower left, J. B. NIESTLÉ. 09. The water pipit is a small, streaked brown songbird that breeds high in the Alps above the treeline and comes down to rivers, lakes and wet meadows for the winter. A German biographical dictionary describes Niestlé's bird pictures of these years as portrait studies of individual animals in surroundings untouched by people. The canvas is about 64 by 90 centimetres, and the museum's catalogue lists only a meadow and a bird among what it shows.