Fuertes Pl. 43, Somaili Greater Bustard

The Fuertes Pl. 43, Somaili Greater Bustard is a striking portrait of this beautiful Ethiopian species.

Printed with archival pigments on rag watercolor paper, this museum-sanctioned, limited-edition print captures the bold contour and defined features of Fuertes’ original watercolor. Embrace your wild side with this extraordinary print!

About the Abyssinian Expedition Watercolors

Louis Agassiz Fuertes’ watercolor sketches from his Abyssinian expedition in 1926 document the beautiful and foreign birds and primates that he encountered while in modern-day Ethiopia. The expedition was funded by the Field Museum, where the original watercolors are housed today in the museum’s Mary W. Runnells Rare Book Room. The Oppenheimer Field Museum Edition of Fuertes’s Abyssinian Expedition Watercolors makes these unique paintings available outside the rare book repository in a limited edition print run of 500. As a master of form, color, and tonality, Fuertes captures the incredibly veristic quality of his subjects on the page.

About Louis Agassiz Fuertes

Born in 1874 in Ithaca, New York, Louis Agassiz Fuertes demonstrated a noticeable talent for art and an interest in birds from a young age. Inspired by the works of Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon, who Fuertes describes as having “the most potent influence that was ever exerted upon my youthful longing to do justice to the singular beauty of birds,” Fuertes enjoyed a prolific career as a bird portraitist, lecturer of ornithology at Cornell University, and an early supporter of the budding conservationist movement. Today he is recognized as one of the greatest artists-naturalists of the 20th century and his artwork can be found in major institutional and private collections worldwide.

About Oppenheimer Editions

Established in 1999, our publishing company Oppenheimer Editions was developed in order to produce modern facsimiles of historic works of art. Marrying cutting-edge digital printing technologies with canonical works of art, Oppenheimer Editions has partnered with prestigious museums to make their holdings accessible to the public as fine art prints. Works from the New-York Historical Society’s unrivaled collections of John James Audubon’s watercolors and the Hudson River School paintings are examples of art that otherwise would be unobtainable.

Among the institutional collections we have partnered with are the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum, and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Our Oppenheimer Editions prints are not mere reproductions. Rather, they are limited-edition fine art prints made with the finest quality archival pigments on rag watercolor paper and executed to exacting standards.

For more information about Fuertes Pl. 43, Somaili Greater Bustard, email us at [email protected] or check out our articles The Abyssinian Bird Portraits of Louis Agassiz Fuertes and Recent Acquisitions – Original Paintings by Louis Agassiz Fuertes.

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