I grew up going to a plantation nearby whose walls were graced with the most magnificent Audubons — the real thing, Audubons…the kind of Audubons that hang behind glass in the rare prints auctions at Sothebys…
And I had no idea how amazing they were. Until I reached my mid 20s and decided I wanted one for my new apartment…yea, right.
There’s such a great story behind Audubon, the man and his art, that we asked our meticulous researcher and contributer, EB Gunn to write an article that would inform us on a number of Audubon fronts. As always, he didn’t let us down.
Audubon Prints By EB Gunn
John James Audubon’s monumental Birds of America contains 435 life-sized prints of 497 species of birds that Audubon encountered in his travels through the frontier areas, towns and seashores of America. These illustrations are the standard by which all drawings of birds before and since are judged.
There are millions of prints and reprints of Audubon’s work in existence today. Some are quite valuable and hang in the White House, museums, embassies, and in palaces across the globe. Audubons are a staple in plantation houses in the South. A discerning eye, especially when aided by a magnifying glass, can tell the valuable Audubons from the common ones in a moment. Yet the collectors’ favorites still occasionally show up in the humblest of places while the commonest of Audubon prints today grace some of the world’s fanciest walls.
Born in Haiti, the illegitimate son of a French sea captain and plantation owner and his French mistress, Audubon (1785-1851) was raised largely by his father’s wife in Nantes, France. The artist’s natural mother died when Audubon was an infant. When he was barely out of adolescence Audubon slipped out of France to America in 1803 on a false passport to avoid conscription into the French Army which was in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars. Settling briefly as a young man on family land near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania where he spent his days hunting, fishing, trapping and drawing his surroundings, the tireless ornithologist began there his methodical study of American birds.
In Pennsylvania he dabbled in taxidermy, started a museum of birds, and conceived the first bird banding experiment known to have been conducted in America, a study the results of which convinced him that Eastern Phoebes, a flycatcher, were migratory but that they returned annually to familiar summer quarters. Early on he also developed his breakthrough modeling process of dropping with light shot the birds he wished to sketch and then with strings and wires arranging them in their characteristic hunting or feeding positions. Previous to Audubon ornithological illustrators had depicted birds only in perching or flying poses.
Birds of America’s first edition, known as the Havell Edition after the London engraver, Robert Havell, Jr. who oversaw its completion, is thought to have been comprised of fewer than 200 complete sets. Two of these have sold at auction in the past few years. A complete set brought $7.9M at Christie’s in New York in 2012, and a similar set brought $11.5M at Sotheby’s in London in 2010. While not precisely books because they were not originally bound, these are among the highest prices ever paid anywhere for books. The first sets of prints were originally produced as book pages, but not bound so as to avoid a British law in effect at the time that required book publishers to donate copies of their books to various British libraries. Hence the Havell Edition is sometimes called the Folio Edition because it was sold not as a bound book but as pages stacked in order in a metal folio. An authentic Havell Edition page will be in the original “Double-Elephant” size (26.5″X39.5″) and can be recognized by holding it to a light and discerning a watermark that reads “Whatman Turkey Mill” or “J.Whatman” after the original paper-maker. A printer credit typically appears in the bottom right of the print below the etched and colored area. For Havells it will read either “Robert Havell” or “W.H.Lizars.” The value of individual uncut Havell Edition prints varies widely at auction, bringing everywhere from $20,000 to $1,500 recently, depending upon the subject and its condition.
In the 1930’s and 1940’s Audubons from Birds of America enjoyed a period of great popularity. In those decades it was a vogue for insurance companies and banks, print shops and non-profits to print up copies of Audubons on standard-sized (8″X10″ & 16″X20″) sheets and either give them away to their customers or sell them cheap. Millions of copies were made this way and while these retain some value ( $10-$75), they are presently of no interest to collectors.