"The Bird To Others Flew"

Edwin Austin Abbey

1887 · Pen and ink on cardboard · Drawings and Prints

Abbey moved to England in 1878 to research and produce illustrations to historical verse for Harper's and settled there permanently in 1883. This drawing comes from a series that responds to "A Love Song" by the British seveenth-century poet George Wither. Two men sit beside a young woman on a bench near a river– with the downcast figure at left representing the narrator who bemoans love's inconstancy in the related text: 'Twas I that paid for all things, 'Twas others dranke the wine; I cannot now recall things, Live but a foole to pine: 'Twas I that beat the bush, The bird to others flew; For she, alasse! hath left me. Reproduced as a wood engraving, the image appeared in Harper's "New Montly Magazine," vol. 75, no. 449, October 1887, p. 745 and in "Old Songs, with Drawings by Edwin A. Abbey & Alfred Parsons," Harper & Brothers, 1889 (see MMA 21.36.112), p. 12.

Artist

Edwin Austin Abbey

Date

1887

Medium

Pen and ink on cardboard

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929