Just off Piccadilly, four blocks from the Ritz, London cabs sat stuck in a sudden standstill. Moments before, the Rountree Tryon Galleries had hung a new work by the thirty-six-year-old artist Anna Clare Lees-Buckley in the window, and passersby were choking up St. James’s Street, taking in the striking sight-size portrait in oils of a gray partridge in flight: the orange head, the rust-red tail, the split black circle of feathers on its silver breast, like a glinting oculus, against a stark white sky.
British culture has long celebrated the partridge, since even before mentions in Shakespeare’s plays and Henry VIII’s conservation decrees to protect it in the 1530s. But this painting doesn’t wallow in the romance of the foggy fields and moors, nor showcase the bird’s iconic status as…
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Garden & Gun (Digital) - 1 Issue, October/November 2023