camouflage egg / do not begrudge conscientious fowl

Grant Wood, The Appraisal (1931)

Anon, HERE AND THERE in Country Life, January 1919—

Just because the hen has somehow gotten the reputation for being a stupid, flighty, indecisive creature is no reason, it appears, for denying her the right to deep-seated likes and dislikes. And sometimes we find these where we would least expect them, as did the Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station when it started an investigation into the relative efficiency of different kinds of nest eggs. As a result of exhaustive tests and careful compilation of data, it was found that above all other types of "camouflage egg" the hen prefers one made of plaster of paris; next in order of acceptability come wooden eggs; next after that real eggs; and lowest of all in popularity stand china eggs, probably the best known and most commonly used. By just what means the investigators interpreted the feelings of their subjects in the matter we do not know; nor does it matter. The point is: so long as the material used has no deleterious effect on the food or other value of the ultimate progeny of the bird, why begrudge the industrious, conscientious fowl the greatest possible solace and contentment during those weeks that she spends in calm, contemplative creation!

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Anon, CAMOUFLAGE IN THE WOOD in Brecon County Times, Neath Gazette and General Advertiser (Wales), September 7, 1918 (Supplement)—

The drafting of men for military service has brought to light some queer occupations, but surely none more out of the ordinary than that of the man who makes imitation pheasant eggs. A man before a Surrey Tribunal said his job was to make an egg which hoodwinked the sitting pheasant. The real eggs were transferred to a broody hen's keeping until near the time of hatching, and the hen pheasant kept at her job by means of the artificial "eggs." Then the real eggs were brought back to be hatched out by a mother who could look after them. These artificial "eggs," it seems, mislead the hen pheasant entirely, and cause foxes, hedgehogs and such marauders furiously to think. It seems rather like a yarn, but the Tribunal accepted it, and gave the man six months' exemption.

Also see: Mimicry, Metaphor and Mistake

New Film / Cook taught Gertrude Stein to drive / 2022

Duplicated from an identical posting on my alternative blog, CAMOUPEDIA , but important enough to deserve it—

I am pleased (albeit exhausted) to say that, as of yesterday, I completed what may be my most ambitious undertaking in recent years. It is a sixty-minute documentary voice-over film biography of the life of William Edwards Cook (1881-1959), an American expatriate artist, who grew up in Iowa, but spent his adult life in Europe, living in Paris, Rome, and Mallorca.

Titled COOK: The Man Who Taught Gertrude Stein to Drive, the film is freely available to everyone here online. More specifically, it is a detailed account of the life-long friendship of Cook with the American writer Gertrude Stein. It is based on her frequent adulation of him in her writings, as well as on the contents of 250 pages of their unpublished correspondence.

Cook was never a well-known artist, but he did acquire some renown for two other reasons: In 1907, he was the first American artist to be allowed to paint a portrait of Pope Pius X. Later, in 1926, he used his inheritance to commission the then-unknown Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier to design an early Modernist home (the "first true cubist house") in Boulogne-sur-Seine, which is still intact, and widely known as Maison Cook or Villa Cook.

The friendship of Gertrude Stein and William Edwards Cook (including the roles of their partners, Alice B. Toklas and Jeanne Moallic Cook) was first documented in (my earlier book)  COOK BOOK: Gertrude Stein, William Cook and Le Corbusier (Bobolink Books, 2005). This new documentary film corrects, updates, and adds to the information in that book.

This film project (as well as the earlier book) was made possible by the earlier work of such Stein scholars as Ulla Dydo, Bruce Kellner, and Rosalind Moad, as well as the Stein / Cook correspondence in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

In 2005, when COOK BOOK was released, Ulla Dydo (the pre-eminent expert on Stein, and author of The Language that Rises) praised it in the following way: "This book jumps out at my eyes, my ears. It comes from everywhere, never drags those even blocks of print that dull the mind. Look at it, read it, let it tease you: It's researched with all the care that keeps its sense of humor and its visual and voice delights. Travel with it, leave home, go and explore the many ways for a book to be a house for living."

The distinguished critic Guy Davenport wrote: "This is as good as topnotch Behrens gets!"

This film is not without humor, and at times it shares surprises. It may prove of particular value to viewers (both scholars and the rest of us) who are particularly interested in American literature, Modernism, Gertrude Stein, art, architecture, horse racing, Harvard, William James, art collectors, expatriates, Paris, Mallorca, the American Midwest, Iowa, art history, the training of artists, Cézanne, Cubism, Picasso, Le Corbusier, LGBT, and gender identity issues.