John James Audubon Prints
1785–1851 · American (born in Saint-Domingue, raised in France) · Ornithological illustration
The Birds of America (1827–1838), restored from Audubon's original folio engravings — owls, the American flamingo, the wild turkey and dozens more, at full fine-art resolution. Each is offered full-bleed or as a captioned specimen.
832 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































About John James Audubon
John James Audubon was born in April 1785 at Les Cayes in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, the son of a French sea captain, and was raised near Nantes. He was sent to the family estate of Mill Grove in Pennsylvania in 1803, moved to Kentucky in 1808 and failed in business there, and by the 1820s had resolved to paint every bird in North America at life size. He shot his specimens, wired them into lifelike poses on a gridded board, and painted them in watercolour, pastel and graphite, often against their habitat or in the act of feeding or fighting. Unable to find a publisher in Philadelphia, he sailed to Britain in 1826. The Birds of America was issued to subscribers between 1827 and 1838: 435 hand-coloured plates engraved in aquatint, after the first ten by W. H. Lizars, by Robert Havell Jr, on double-elephant sheets roughly 39 by 26 inches so that even the Wild Turkey and the Great Blue Heron could appear at actual size. The accompanying text, the Ornithological Biography, came out in five volumes from 1831 to 1839. He then turned to mammals, and The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, with John Bachman and his son John Woodhouse Audubon, appeared from 1845. He died in New York in January 1851. The plates were composed as pictures, not diagrams, which is why they have hung on walls ever since.
- How Audubon actually made The Birds of America · Wired birds on a gridded board, life-size watercolours, copper plates engraved in Edinburgh and London, and 435 plates sold five at a time from 1827 to 1838.
































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































