Provenance:
Acquired by the family of the present owner, circa 1920
Mildred Butler loved birds and they are among her most characteristic subjects. When the Chantrey Bequest, which had been set up to buy notable works of art for the Tate Gallery in London, set out in 1896 to buy an example of Butler's work for the Gallery, they chose A Morning Bath, which shows pigeons in a bird bath. Just as The Grey Cock shows, she was capable of endowing avian subjects with great subtleties of psychology, mood and technique.
Perhaps the best-known of her bird subjects are to do with the groups, or clamours, of rooks which congregated in trees around her home, Kilmurry, near Thomastown in Co. Kilkenny: she attributes these subjects with all the character that another artist might give to a group of drinkers in a bar or a clutch of gossiping women. The Grey Cock has all of this psychological complexity, and is to my mind a picture of much greater charm and rarity. She portrays the strut of the dominant male, undercut with a hesitancy of poise which seems to betray the anxiety of one who knows that others are out to take his place. At the same time, it is a brilliant and sympathetic piece of nature-painting, and a highly accomplished water-colour painted straight from life (a considerable rarity at the time).
The critic of the American magazine Hearth and Home described her habit of painting straight from life and remarked that �this gives an actuality and a freshness which can be acquired in no other way. Miss Butler�s landscape bears always the impress of truth�. It is sometimes easy to forget that Butler was an artistic pioneer of her time in this respect. She traveled to Brussels and Paris in the early 1880s to study painting, along with contemporaries such as Walter Osborne and Sir John Lavery, at a time when this was considered highly unorthodox in British art circles (the Royal Academy in London refused to show artists who painted in the �French style� and the young painters who did so had to form their own society in order to exhibit). Like woman artists of the following generation like Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett, Mildred Butler brought the lessons of European modernism to a uniquely Irish subject-matter.
