This is Faroese art before Faroese art. Five miraculously surviving bird images painted at a time when art and artists were unknown entities in the Faroe Islands.

Díðrikur was a farmhand in Sandoy, and at one point he served with a priest with a keen interest in nature. Here the gifted farmhand saw some of the bird guides of the time, whose illustrations he translated into a decorative folk art style.

“The Moon’s Doves” is written on one of the papers. This was the name of the rock dove, which lays an egg once a month in springtime. The poetic name must have fuelled the painter’s imagination, because the doves here are more colourful than the blue rock dove, which Díðrikur has rendered on one of the other sheets (the one bottom left).