Birds of America Double-elephant folio Editions
Viviparous Quadruped Imperial Folio Editions
America’s most revered artist-naturalist, John James Audubon (1785—1851), is renowned for his extraordinary undertaking to record The Birds of America & The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. The images he created are icons of 19th-century art and capture the nascent stages of American natural history.
Audubon’s muti-decade venture resulted in the publication of his monumental folio “The Birds of America” which documented over 700 bird species on 435 plates. In a similar manner and with the help of his two sons and his friend Reverend John Bachman, Audubon later produced “The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America,” which contained 150 plates depicting the mammals of North America. Audubon’s folios were seismic in the fields of ornithology and mammalogy and set a new precedent for natural history illustration.
Born in 1785 in Les Cayes, Santo Domingo (Haiti) to a Creole mother and French father, Audubon spent the early years of his life in France and move to America at age 18. It was during this time that his appreciation for birds flourished and he developed a keen artistic acumen for rendering wildlife. It was not until 1819 when Audubon was married and the father of two sons, that he embraced the life of artist-naturalist and embarked on his venture through the backwoods of America with the intent of illustrating the avian life he encountered there.