Likeness Print by Tristan Sherwood

From a series of exclusive prints by various artists commissioned for Pallant House Gallery. Exhibited alongside the 2020 exhibition ‘Drawn to Nature: Gilbert White and the Artists’.

Sherwood has commented: ‘This print explores the idea of the mimetic in both art and nature. The many editions of Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne have spawned numerous illustrative ‘incarnations’ of White’s cuckoo. This scenario formed a poetic motif, through which I could illustrate the nature of similitude. Making work ‘after’ another artist could be seen as equivalent to the parasitic nature of the cuckoo. Thomas Bewick, Eric Ravilious and Agnes Miller Parker are clearly informed by their antecedants, unlike the cuckoo itself it is their distinct interpretations which nestle their own birds within our mind’s eye.’