Audubon.(Audubon: Early Drawings)

Audubon: Early Drawings. Introduction by Richard Rhodes, Scientific Commentary by Scott V. Edwards, Foreword by Leslie A. Morris. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2008.

In the realm of ornithology, few works occupy such totemic stature as both scientific documentation and fine art as The Birds of America by John James Audubon. First published by subscription from 1827 to 1838, the original edition ran to approximately 200 completed copies, consisting of 435 hand-colored copper engravings. Audubon's insistence that each bird specimen be depicted at life size--including such majestic creatures as the Wild Turkey and the Golden Eagle--necessitated that the publication be produced in double-elephant folio size (averaging 39 1/2 by 29 1/2 inches), and, though an octavo edition of the work was later published for more popular consumption, the original Audubon folio occupies a place in collectors' minds akin to the First Folio of William Shakespeare.

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The Birds of America represents Audubon's mature style, magisterial in its polish and detail. This new volume of Audubon's early drawings from the Harris Collection in the Houghton Library at Harvard University reveals the self-taught artistic course he followed to achieve that end.

Early drawings by Audubon are extremely rare, simply because, as his draftsmanship improved, he would destroy earlier renderings. Nevertheless, he did maintain a collection of such pieces to sell at the small exhibitions he mounted to attract patrons and clients. At one such exhibition, in Philadelphia in 1824, he met Edward Harris Jr., a gentleman farmer from New Jersey and accomplished amateur naturalist who not only purchased all the drawings on display for Audubon's asking prices (a sum amounting to $10.50), but two days later presented Audubon with a gift of $100, declaring that men such as Audubon should not want for money. The two men became fast friends, later traveling together on ornithological expeditions around North America. Beginning three decades after Harris's death in 1863, much of his ...