Art Review

Birds of a Feather: ShelburneMuseum’sDecoyCollection

At Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vt. Through May 1. 802-985-3346, www.shelburnemuseum.org

SHELBURNE, Vt. — Decoys — three-dimensional replicas of birds that are used to deceive and lure in other birds, which are then shot — are the subject of one of the most absorbing exhibitions anywhere in New England this winter. The show, “Birds of a Feather: Shelburne Museum’s Decoy Collection,’’ is at the Shelburne Museum.

Concise and beautifully presented, the show is drawn from the museum’s own collection of around 1,400 decoys (one of the finest such collections anywhere in the world). Combining great craftsmanship and cunning with a healthy dollop of illusion and fancy, these objects will be of interest to naturalists and bird lovers as much as to artists, art lovers, and anyone interested in the history of taste.

Almost any native of rural Vermont might be better qualified to write about decoys than I am. I’ve never shot anything, except maybe a rabbit, riddled with myxomatosis, back in my native Australia — although I was armed with no more than an air rifle and I seem to remember the poor thing hobbling away.

I’ve certainly never shot anything out of the sky. So I know nothing about how to tell a merganser from a wigeon, an eider from a scoter, a teal from an oldsquaw, a pintail from a shoveler, or a bufflehead from a goldeneye. Even the basic distinction between dabbling ducks and diving (or dipper) ducks is new to me.

But I do get the basic idea behind decoys. Fundamentally, they’re all about deception. Deception, and murder.

And so I’m interested. Who wouldn’t be?

It sounds classically human, on the one hand: What a treacherous species we are! But of course, deception — or what naturalists call “distraction display’’ — is a common ploy among our plumed friends as well. The killdeer, for instance, is just one of several bird species that will make an elaborate, and totally fake, display of being injured or ill, flapping pathetically along the ground — an avian version of the dinner bell — in order to lure predators away from its nest.

With the same motivation, rails, shorebirds, and various songbirds will also perform what’s called the “rodent run,’’ tearing along on two legs through undergrowth, trying in earnest — and despite the distinct disadvantage of having only two legs — to make like a rat or vole.

Distraction, deceit, and a true and wholehearted commitment to performance, in other words, are not just employed during the sexual merry-go-round. They are fundamental to survival itself, and also to predation — which amounts, perhaps, to the same thing.

Hunters once used domesticated ducks to lure their kind within gunshot range. But over time, actual replicas made from carved wood, often elaborately painted, came to be used.

“You’ve got to make ’em good enough to fool the sharp eyes of a duck or goose,’’ said one legendary Massachusetts decoy maker, Joseph Lincoln. “And you just bet that those birds have the sharpest eyes and the cunningest brains that there are in the bird family. A turn of the knife the wrong way, a peculiar tilt of the head, such is not affected by the duck or goose family, and your work is spoiled.’’

If only every artwork were made with a feeling that so much was at stake!

Lincoln was famous for slat geese decoys. These were big, boat-shaped decoys with slatted sides. They were oversize to maximize the chances of attracting high-flying migratory geese. They were used commonly on Cape Cod in the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th.

Among the oldest and most prestigious decoys in the show are the Canada geese carved by Captain Charles Osgood in about 1849 — reputedly during the several months he spent waiting for cargo to be loaded onto his ship in San Francisco harbor. The Shelburne has seven of the 10 superb geese Osgood carved at this time.

In the latter part of the 19th century, unregulated market gunning and hunting had pushed many species toward extinction. In 1918, the US Congress passed the Migratory Bird Act, which controlled hunting and significantly lowered the demand for decoys.

Joel Barber, a New York City architect and sporting shooter, who had a good eye for aesthetics (he was also a watercolorist and carver) began collecting them as a form of folk art. He wrote a book, “Wild Fowl Decoys’’ (1934) which helped forge a kind of canon of the most important decoy makers.

The best-known are all here, including Osgood, Nathan Cobb, A. Elmer Crowell, and Charles “Shang’’ Wheeler. Barber sold his collection to Electra Havemeyer Webb, the Shelburne Museum’s far-sighted founder.

Many decoy makers used standardized bodies with only the head specific to the species. The brothers Lee and Lem Dudley, whose squat but still elegant “Ruddy Duck Hen Decoy’’ is one of the most famous pieces here, made sure to match each bird’s entire body to the appropriate species.

As working objects, decoys would have been bundled into bags and often carried long distances by hunters and sporting shooters. Crowell, who ran a gunning camp in Beverly, divided his decoy production into three grades. It seems unlikely that his high grade “Preening Black Decoy’’ of 1920 (the bird’s rounded head and elongated neck double back over its tear-shaped body; two feathers protrude like fins or cyclamen petals; the thing is unbelievably zaftig) was made to be used. The protruding feathers, for starters, would likely have broken off. It’s a fine thing they didn’t.

The show also includes several vessels big enough to hold humans. One of them, a so-called “sinkbox,’’ is a contraption designed to sit low in the water so that hunters could lie or crouch in wait for birds to come within range.

Sinkboxes were controversial because they were so murderously effective: The conservationist Ferdinand C. Latrobe described one as “a wholesale murdering sort of thing that has little ‘sport’ about it.’’

The sinkbox here, which would have been tethered to outriggers for stability and weighed down by 24-pound cast iron decoys, was also painted with ducks in silhouette.

There is a famous Arnold Newman photograph, as the Shelburne Museum’s director Tom Denenburg reminded me, of the Japanese-born American painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi. Kuniyoshi sits back, legs nonchalantly crossed, on a chaise longue. On the American-style rounded side-table beside him sits a duck decoy, and a compote with grapes.

The decoy’s presence in such a self-consciously modern, cosmopolitan picture reminds us of the affinities between strains of formal simplification common to both modernism and folk art. Modernists came to love decoys for these very qualities, and they were, and remain — just like Shaker quilts and tribal rugs — common sights in certain classically modernist domestic interiors.

But the bunch of grapes in Newman’s photo also reminds me of the legend that probably hovers somewhere in the background whenever anyone tries to write about decoys from an aesthetic point of view. It’s the one told by Pliny the Elder, in his “Naturalis Historia.’’

Zeuxis and his rival Parrhasius, according to Pliny, staged a contest to determine who was the greater artist. Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes so lifelike that birds flew down to peck at them.

Parrhasius’s response set a new benchmark for treachery. His painting was concealed behind a curtain, and when he asked Zeuxis to pull the curtain aside, it was revealed as an illusion. “I have deceived the birds,’’ said Zeuxis, in his concession speech, “but Parrhasius has deceived Zeuxis.’’

Deception, I tell you: It’s at the heart of life itself. And despite the utilitarian roots of decoys, something about their evolution leads us to the very heart of aesthetics.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.