Yale News: Audubon at Yale

FROM YaleNews,  June 30, 2015:

Audubon’s ‘Birds of America’ at Yale: creating a masterwork one feather at a time, by Mike Cummings

Writing from Edinburgh in December 1826, John James Audubon updated his wife, Lucy, on efforts to publish his life-size watercolors of North American birds. He was pleased with his progress.

“It is now a month since my work has begun by Mr. W.H. Lizars of this city — it is come out in numbers of 5 prints all the size of life and in the same size paper of my largest drawings that is called double (elephant) — they will be brought up & finished in such superb style as to eclipse all of the kind in existence,” he wrote in the letter now housed at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

More than dozen years later, Audubon and his associates completed the double elephant folio of “The Birds of America.” His boasts to Lucy seem justified. The work is hailed as a masterpiece of printing, artistry, and ornithology.

Yale owns two complete sets of the double elephant folio — a term that refers to the work’s extraordinary size. One is now on view at the Peabody Museum of Natural History alongside five of the original engraved copper plates used to create it. The plates, among about 80 known to exist, produced prints of the following birds: the black vulture, herring gull, black skimmer, marsh hawk, and back scoter. …

READ the complete article: “Audubon’s ‘Birds of America’ at Yale: creating a masterwork one feather at a time” by Mike Cummings