With the end of college baseball’s summer season, we were free to travel again. So we traveled 45 minutes to Houston and the Houston Natural Science Museum for their special Audubon Exhibit. This is their description on the exhibit:
Published as a series between 1827 and 1838, Birds of America by John James Audubon (1785-1851) was a landmark work which achieved international renown due to the epic scale of the project and the book’s spectacular, life-sized ornithological illustrations.
Audubon’s Birds of America is a touring exhibition from National Museums Scotland and will showcase 46 prints from their collection. A rare unbound collection, this exhibition will be a unique opportunity to see so much of Audubon’s work in one place.
They also wanted to remind us that although he was an artist, at one time he was also a slave holder. Other sources tell of his white supremacist views despite his birth mother being of mixed race. He was also accused of fraud and plagiarism. I’m surprised there was no protest outside the museum.
Wikipedia adds this information about Birds of America:
This monumental work consists of 435 hand-colored, life-size prints of 497 bird species, made from engraved copper plates of various sizes depending on the size of the image. They were printed on sheets measuring about 39 by 26 inches (990 by 660 mm). The work illustrates slightly more than 700 North American bird species, of which some were based on specimens collected by fellow ornithologist John Kirk Townsend on his journey across America with Thomas Nuttall in 1834 as part of Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth’s second expedition across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean.
Despite his faults he drew nice pictures of birds. Here’s a sampling:
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- Song Sparrow. My dad called all sparrows “spotsies.” Long ago I could identify sparrow species of Ohio thanks to Roger Tory Peterson’s field guide to birds.
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- Mocking Birds. We often see these in our back yard.
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- California Condor. Once on the verge of extinction, a breeding program has them now flourishing in the wild.
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- Flourishing indeed. I took this photo of a California Condor in flight at the Grand Canyon in 2017.
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- Turkey Vultures. He called them Turkey Buzzards .We often see them here.
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- Heron.
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- This is the plate for the heron picture. It’s a copper plate that is used to print the page. The page is hand colored. The exhibit included a video of the process.
The exhibit included birds of Texas from his 1837 visit to The Republic of Texas.