About John James Audubon & The Birds of America
John James Audubon was born on his father’s plantation in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1785, and raised in Nantes, France, in the wake of the French Revolution. Anxious for him to avoid conscription into Napoleon’s army, his family sent Audubon to America at age 18 to oversee their estate in Pennsylvania. An avid naturalist and artist, Audubon quickly adapted to his new country. Particularly fascinated by birds, he traveled extensively to document as many species as possible, and spent long hours observing them in their natural habitat. He determined that his drawings would be life-sized and “drawn from nature” —exhibiting behaviors seen in the wild rather than depicted in flat profile. Though he would later deplore the mass slaughter of birds, Audubon himself was an avid hunter and killed and mounted the specimens he drew.
Audubon eventually completed watercolor paintings of 489 species of North American birds, from Florida to Labrador. Audubon had difficulty finding a printer who would work on a project of this scope—a total of 435 plates, each measuring over 3 by 2 feet. He was fortunate to finally secure the services of Robert Havell, Jr., an engraver in London who meticulously rendered Audubon’s watercolors onto copperplate. The laborious process of engraving, etching and aquatint, was followed by hand-coloring by Havell’s staff of watercolorists. As a result of his eye for composition, Havell enhanced many of the originals, and some of the engravings he produced vary noticeably from Audubon’s original watercolors (now held by the New York Historical Society).
This Havell edition of Birds of America is called the double elephant folio because of its size, and was sold by subscription, in groups of five prints. The complete set of plates was typically bound in four volumes by the individual owners. The number of subscribers varied, but most likely no more than 200 double elephant folios were produced, of which 120 complete sets are believed to remain today. This unique edition of Birds of America was never replicated, due to the costly production.
Subsequent editions include the smaller royal octavo edition (10 ½ by 6 ½ inches) produced under the direction of lithographer John T. Bowen in Philadelphia from 1839-1844 (also owned by The Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). The royal octavo was followed by an intended replica of the double elephant folio by means of chromolithography, commonly known as the Bien edition. Only 150 of the original images were reproduced, however, before the project was abandoned. Since then, three complete facsimile editions of the double elephant folio have been produced: the Amsterdam edition (1971-1973), the Abbeville edition (1985), and the Audubon Centennial edition (2005-2006). A copy of the Abbeville edition was purchased by the Library Friends in 1988, with funds from the restoration project. Prints from this edition are displayed in an exhibit case outside the Reference Room, on the 2nd floor of the Main Library and rotated weekly.
