The Feathered Drawer by Hamish Foote

Pycroft's Supper details the tragic sight of the tagged body of a huia lying across a dinner plate. Picture / Richard Robinson

Around 100 years ago, a bird hunter brought the carcass of a huia to Auckland taxidermist A.T. Pycroft. The scientist skinned the bird ... then asked his housekeeper to cook it for his supper.

Auckland War Memorial Museum curator of birds Brian Gill is not sure when this incident took place but he calculates it was when Pycroft, born in 1875, was around 30. The last sighting of a huia was in 1907.

That story, tragic in hindsight, has inspired the narrative in Auckland artist Hamish Foote's painting Pycroft's Supper, which shows the life-size tagged body of a huia from the museum's bird collection laid across a Victorian-era plate.

The utensils are authentic for the times and the viewer looks down on the ghastly supper from the viewpoint of the diner.

Pycroft's Supper is one of seven paintings in Foote's new exhibition The Feathered Drawer, a twin reference to the museum's drawers of hundreds of bird specimens, some of which are extinct or on the verge of disappearance, and to the centuries-old technique of drawing birds.

Foote, who completed his doctorate in fine art at Elam last year, lectures in architecture and landscape architecture at Unitec, and teaches botanical drawing at the University of Auckland.

For more than a decade his work has reflected a fascination with the strange, often melancholy tales of our young colonial history.

This show is the result of two years' work as part of a research proposal for Unitec, an intersection of art, science and nature supported by a solid body of references and research writing condensed into the catalogue Foote has co-written with art historian Jemma Field, of Artis Gallery.

Brian Gill, the museum's curator of birds since 1982, has written the foreword and provided inspiration and guidance, according to Foote.

"Brian can be a bit clever," he says, pointing to the painting Congregation, which portrays a mounted kiwi and falcon, surrounded by five eggs and flying hummingbirds. "I'd go in there and he'd have stuff out, casually arranged on the table.

"On the day I'd told him I was interested in looking at tawny endemic species, he had the falcon and kiwi out, but also shining cuckoos and a fern bird. They were unbelievably beautiful."

Kingfisher's Lament shows a dead kingfisher flat on its back, surveyed by weka and hummingbirds flut-tering around, a work inspired by natural history "enthusiast" Otto Finch's donation of 24 exotic hummingbird skins to the museum, which were matched with 24 skins from Canterbury.

"I liked the juxtaposition of exotic and endemic," says Foote. "That's to do with my interest in colonisation and globalisation where competition [between species] often precipitates extinction."

In Story Book, Foote has painstakingly painted pages from a book of bird lithography by 19th-century natural history artist J. G. Keulemans, who illustrated Buller's History of the Birds of New Zealand.

The illustrations in the book are bright and colourful, he points out. "In contrast, the birds in the museum, when you open the drawers, seem to me to be faded, and they are impregnated with arsenic."

Two years ago, Foote was still finishing off the work for his Exotica Indigenis Immixta show, which played with similar themes of the introduction of the exotic, such as Governor Grey's zebra on Kawau Island, and the sadness of extinction.

It was then that he heard the Pycroft story and the seeds for this show started to grow.

"Because I am such a slow painter, I have these ideas and get a very clear visual image in my mind's eye.

"Then it takes me about two years before I can finish. There are so many stories, I don't have to put kooky compositions together. I just paint what happened," he says.

"As an artist I am fixated with beauty, and with the melancholic. When you go into the museum, you cannot escape those two. The feathered drawers are breathtakingly beautiful but absolutely tragic.

"When you open the drawers there are about 20 or 30 species that are no longer around. All of the dead birds are powerful ... I am on the ropes when I'm in there, staggering from one spectacle to another."

At the end of the catalogue, Victorian writer and critic John Ruskin is quoted: "I have made a great mistake ... had I devoted myself to birds, their life and plumage, I might have produced something worth doing."

Artis Gallery, 280 Parnell Rd, to April 9