The Volumes:
The Birds of America is John James Audubon's masterpiece, a four-volume collection of 435 life-sized, hand-colored prints of North American birds, published between 1827 and 1838. Known as the "Double Elephant Folio" due to its massive size (nearly 40x29 inches), the work is celebrated for its stunning artistic quality, scientific accuracy, and detailed depictions of birds in their natural habitats, making it a landmark in both art and natural history.
The Artist:
John James Audubon (born Jean-Jacques Rabin, April 26, 1785 – January 27, 1851) was a French-American artist, entrepreneur, naturalist, explorer, and ornithologist. Audubon is best known for The Birds of America, a book of 435 images, portraits of every bird then known in the United States – painted and reproduced in the size of life.
Its creation cost Audubon eighteen years of monumental effort in finding the birds, making the book, and selling it to subscribers. Audubon also wrote thousands of pages about birds (Ornithological Biography); he’d completed half of a collection of paintings of mammals (The Viviparous Quadrapeds of North America) when his eyesight failed in 1846.
His story is a dramatic and surprising one. Audubon was not born in America, but saw more of the North American continent than virtually anyone alive, and even in his own time he came to exemplify America – the place of wilderness and wild things. The history of his life reveals his era and his nation: he lived in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina and New York – traveled everywhere from Labrador to the Dry Tortugas off Florida, from the Republic of Texas to the mouth of the Yellowstone – was a merchant, salesman, teacher, hunter, itinerant portraitist and woodsman, an artist and a scientist. He was, in a sense, a one-man compendium of American culture of his time. And his growing apprehension about the destruction of nature became a prophecy of his nation’s convictions in the century after his death.
So it is that Audubon has been called “an archetypal American who astonishingly combined in equal measure the virtues of George Washington, Daniel Boone and Benjamin Franklin” and “the nearest thing American art has had to a founding father.”
The Edition:
The M. Bernard Loates "Master Edition" of John James Audubon’s Birds of America (initiated in 1992) involved a specialized, rigorous process where Loates and his team of master lithographers and colorists stripped the coloring from the original back to the original black-and-white image showing the original drawing in the crispest detail, with each color than applied in layers. It all combines into unique art that's quite stunning & not like any of the giclees or other lithographed Audubon editions.
Key details of this process and edition include:
Each print is a strictly limited edition, individually pencil-numbered, and bears an embossed seals in the lower margin to ensure authenticity.
Condition:
A genuine Loates Edition Folio after Audubon's original. Appears to be in excellent, virtually pristine condition, possible minor typical character or handling with for a sheet this huge, but I've not found any. It's been carefully stored flat in an archival sleeve. Please peruse the photos & Description ~
Text Page(s):
This one comes without original page(s) of text.
About this Species:
Size:
39-1/2 x 26-1/2 inches approximately.
Combined Shipping:
Yes! Multiple prints can be combine into one tube. eBay should auto-combine your items if you put all of your selections into your shopping cart & check out all together as one order.
If you purchase them individually, eBay charges shipping on each, which I then will need to refund after. If you're assessed multiple shipping charges for one combined package, I will endeavor to refund any overage asap.
Thanks for Visiting!
Please note: The information I've included in this listing is based on my best research & observations as an enthusiast of these works, not a professional historian of antiquarian books & prints. I do like to offer some background information readily available to me but make no claims representations of total accuracy. Any corrections or further information you might offer would certainly appreciated! The scans in the images are my best efforts to accurately show the item. Antique prints & old paper are notoriously tricky to scan accurately. In my experience, scanners tend to be thrown off by the off-whites & gradations in age-toned paper. If the scanner produces a scan that's too dark or too brown, etc, I'll often try to reasonably color-correct to represent the print as accurately as possible. I'm not a professional in color-correcting images yet I try my best to show the print as close to the original as possible. I also find that different monitors show colors differently, & eBay's system can sometimes throw off the colors a bit in the uploaded JPEG images as they appear on their site. Thank you!