A Love Affair with Birds: The Life of Thomas Sadler Roberts

Chapter 15: The Cardinal Hour

211 • Chapter 15 The Cardinal Hour These fading woods and shortening days, and the chilling woods that make life hard and dangerous, warn [the Ovenbird] that it is time to hie himself away. —The Birds of Minnesota, 2: 248 The letter from his old friend Frank Chapman must have stung, rubbing salt into a wound still fresh from the blow that Roberts had been dealt before Christmas. Lee Jaques would not be coming to do any work at the new museum. “I can only hope that . . . you will find another Jaques in Minnesota and give him the opportunity for development that Jaques has found here,” Chapman had written.1 Had he meant to be kind? The line could be read as a subtle allusion to lore that long ago, at the start of Jaques’s career, Roberts had passed over an opportunity to hire the unknown artist. Soon after, given the chance, Chapman signed on the painter and had chortled over his find for decades.2 It was also a disingenuous wish: Jaques had honed his craft for years. He was at his peak. No wildlife artist in the country could match his skill. Roberts was not going to find another Jaques anywhere. Roberts was now an old man. Eighty-two on his next birthday, his hair was white, his mustache also, though a bit more tamed than in his younger days. His posture stooped, his belly ample, he no longer moved briskly, but the light in his eyes was still both keen and reflective. He scarcely had time to dwell on a tactless letter. The museum staff was in the thick of things, coping with the move into the new building. The dioramas from Zoology were in pieces, Kilgore confronted the skins in disarray, and Breckenridge was pulled in a thousand directions. Within days, Roberts sent an answer to Chapman that confounded in its own way: “Word has just come from Mr. Bell that ‘Mr. Jaques’s services will be available’ and directing that I get in The Cardinal Hour 212 touch with you. What does this mean? I have no details. . . . Mr. Bell seems to have taken the matter in hand as he was very anxious for Jaques to do the background.”3 Soon after, the American Museum’s director, Roy Chapman Andrews, sentanofficial notificationthat“thesituationhaschanged,”butitwasChapman who wrote Roberts, in a second letter, that Bell had recently come to the American Museum to confer with him and Director Andrews. A third letter,thisonefromthebenefactorhimself,arrivedatRoberts’sdesk:“Ihave the two sketches [for the proposed wolf group.] . . . I think one probably associates timber wolves with the winter more than any other time and, I would say, with heavy timber rather than open places. On the other hand, the open lakeshore scene appeals to me far more.”4 Like Roberts, Bell had dreams for the new museum. Jaques arrived on April 7, conferred with Bell at his office, then went off with Breckenridge to the North Shore to do preliminary sketches. Within days, he was back at the museum and beginning to paint. The pinkish rhyolite cliffs of Palisade Head, a stormy Lake Superior lapping at its base, materialized under his brush as the artist painted with scant pause. Roberts enticed him out to the Cedar Avenue bridge one Sunday to observe migrating Tundra Swans (the Jaqueses were once again at home in the Robertses’ lower apartment), and he took time off for an occasional Roberts dinner party. That May, the museum opened to the public, and people got a rare treat of watching the artist at work and a large group display come together. By May’s end, the wolf background was complete, and Jaques began a second, this one set on Lake Pepin in southern Minnesota. The diorama would eventually include migrating shorebirds, both mounted by Breckenridge in the foreground and painted in the background, a tricky challenge to proportion properly. Jaques exhibited his masterful eye in executing a nearseamlesstransition .AviewermightexpecttoseethemountedCaspianTern take off and head out over the water. By the end of June, Jaques was cleaning his brushes, pleased with the whirlwind session. And despite the haste, his genius hadnotdesertedhim.Bellwouldlaterremarkthatofallthefinework in the new museum, the Lake Pepin background pleased him the most.5 It did not take long for the museum staff to settle into the new accommodations . A tradition sprang up in the sunny lunchroom adjacent to the The Cardinal Hour 213 main offices...