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John James Audubon (American, 1785 - 1851)
Page from The Birds of America, 1827-1838
Hand-colored aquatint/engraving on Whatman paper, bound in 4 volumes
3ft 2in x 2ft 1in (96.5cm x 63.5cm)
Transfer from the North Carolina State Library, 1974 (74.27.1-4)
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In a time when roads were few and the West was little studied, John James Audubon conceived one of the most ambitious publishing projects ever: to reproduce paintings of all the birds of North America life-sized. During the 1820s and 1830s, when Audubon was struggling to achieve his monumental goal, no museum collection could provide a complete set of specimens to study, so he had to collect them in the wild.
His goal of publishing the images life-sized required the prints to be very large and expensive. To achieve the highest quality of printing and the funds to do the job, he had to voyage to Europe in 1826. The English printer Robert Havell printed Audubon's art on the largest sheets of paper available, about 40 inches high, making volumes of such enormous size that they are called the "double-elephant folio." Havell used Audubon's watercolors as models for his printmakers to copy, using the processes of engraving and aquatint. Colorists applied the color by hand to each black-and-white print. Audubon conceived of the prints as bound in four volumes with one hundred plates each, but the fourth volume required 135 in order to include all the species he had painted.
Among the subscribers for The Birds of America were the kings of England and France, Daniel Webster, and the Library of Congress. In 1846 Governor William Alexander Graham decided that North Carolina should have a set, the copy later transferred from the State Library to the Museum.
This page depicts the long-billed curlew, a shore bird that Audubon found off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina.
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