Butterworth has been recognised as the pre-eminent bird painter of her time and is praised for the work she has shown at exhibition, as well as for several exquisite books that have been commissioned from her, Dunlop compares her work to Lear and says "Certainly she is without rival this century".
Major Public Collections Elizabeth Butterworth is represented in leading public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Natural History Museum, London.
Mark Fisher, The Spectator, 24 February 2007. At first glance Elizabeth Butterworth is a natural history illustrator in the tradition of Audubon, Gould and Lear, each of whom drew parrots. Her technique is immaculate, her ability to depict the detail and texture of feathers and plumage as startling as Holbein's painting of fur and hair. She is also a superb colourist, plumbing the shaded depths of indigos and blacks, of petrol blues and greens... In her gouache of a roseate cockatoos wing and her watercolour of a wing of Banksian Cockatoo, she is poised between scientific recording and imaginative art. Go and look and wonder.
Richard Verdi, curator, Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Elizabeth Butterworth is a superb draughtsman whether she is describing the enamel-like surface of a bird's beak or the frayed edges of a bird's feather. She does so with consummate precision, making scrupulous observation the cornerstone of her art. Coupled with this is the purity and intensity of her colour, which convinces us that this is exactly how these birds actually look, while also arousing a sense of wonderment at their spectacular and variegated plumage. This combination of incisive drawing and intensely saturated colour makes her images leap from the page with a revelatory clarity and immediacy.
Major Public Collections Elizabeth Butterworth is represented in leading public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Natural History Museum, London.
Critics on Elizabeth Butterworth
Ian Dunlop, formerly Head of Modern Art, Sotheby's, New York; Art Adviser to Citibank. Elizabeth Butterworth is not the first British artist to succeed in capturing on paper the brilliant plumage of Macaws, but with Edward Lear must be considered one of the best. Certainly she is without rival this century. Her success stems partly from intense powers of observation and partly from an encyclopaedic knowledge of her subject. She has sketched them in the privacy of private collections and in their natural state in the rainforests of South America. She has examined skins in natural history museums in London and New York and could tell you the number of feathers in a tail and the size of beak to the nearest millimetre. It is this attention to detail combined with powers of observation that lifts her watercolours and drawings from plain description into the realms of high art.Mark Fisher, The Spectator, 24 February 2007. At first glance Elizabeth Butterworth is a natural history illustrator in the tradition of Audubon, Gould and Lear, each of whom drew parrots. Her technique is immaculate, her ability to depict the detail and texture of feathers and plumage as startling as Holbein's painting of fur and hair. She is also a superb colourist, plumbing the shaded depths of indigos and blacks, of petrol blues and greens... In her gouache of a roseate cockatoos wing and her watercolour of a wing of Banksian Cockatoo, she is poised between scientific recording and imaginative art. Go and look and wonder.
Richard Verdi, curator, Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Elizabeth Butterworth is a superb draughtsman whether she is describing the enamel-like surface of a bird's beak or the frayed edges of a bird's feather. She does so with consummate precision, making scrupulous observation the cornerstone of her art. Coupled with this is the purity and intensity of her colour, which convinces us that this is exactly how these birds actually look, while also arousing a sense of wonderment at their spectacular and variegated plumage. This combination of incisive drawing and intensely saturated colour makes her images leap from the page with a revelatory clarity and immediacy.