Porcelain Birds

Manhattan importers were six months, behind with their orders. Porcelain fanciers, in an invisible but impatient queue, waited last week for their ceramic birds, which they bought as fast as they could be imported from Britain. The superbly color-glazed, life-sized birds, perched in natural flower and branch settings, cost from $250 to $475 a pair.

Creator of the birds is Dorothy Doughty (rhymes with doubty), eldest daughter of the late great Charles Montagu (Travels in Arabia Deserta) Doughty (TIME, Sept. 6). Shy, 51 and a spinster, Ceramist Doughty lives in Cornwall, England. Some ten years ago, she was inspired by John James Audubon's Birds of America, is now England's only fashioner in porcelain of the birds of the U.S.

Artist Doughty's porcelain birds are as meticulously realistic as Audubon's. But she does not depend on him for her avian observations. For that purpose she had a big wire cage constructed around an old apple tree, filled it with birds imported from the U.S. There Artist Doughty spends months studying her birds, sketching poses, shaping preliminary models. Then, in a single intense day of disciplined haste, a final image is made. Because porcelain products shrink to one-third model-size when fired in the kiln (the temperature goes as high as 1,200DEG F.), they must be painstakingly pre-sized. Because thin, delicate clay shapes (such as flower petals) can stand less heat than heavier parts, porcelain models as variable as the Doughty birds are baked by a complicated shifting of heavy and light parts to higher and lower temperatures.

Miss Doughty has a kiln of her own, but her birds are now kiln-fired at Britain's Royal Worcester Porcelain Co., where reproductions are made in limited editions. So highly does Royal Worcester rate Miss Doughty's work that it has originated a new mark, a gold W, to stamp them with.

Artist Doughty's bird-making was interrupted when, after the fall of France, she took a job in the Royal Naval dockyard at Chatham, Kent. Later she was injured at the yards, returned to her porcelain birds in Cornwall. There she lives quietly with her mother, spends most of her days in her studio. The U.S. bird series now numbers ten pairs. Among them: goldfinches, chickadees, indigo buntings, Baltimore Orioles, mockingbirds. One of the fortunate owners of a complete set of Doughty birds: former director of National Audubon Society Mrs. Carll Tucker.

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