435 High Resolution Images from John Audubon’s The Birds of America for Free Download

Plate 171. Barn Owl

The National Audubon Society has recently made John James Audubon’s seminal Birds of America available to the public in a downloadable digital library (signing up for their email list is a prerequisite).

Birds of America was printed between 1827 and 1838, and was filled prints created from hand-engraved plates based on Audubon’s original watercolor paintings. In addition to the prints, each bird’s page also includes a recording of the animal’s call, plus extensive written texts from the period of the book’s printing.

You can browse and download the full set of John James Audubon's landmark watercolor prints here.

Audubon is widely lauded as the individual who brought an awareness and appreciation of birds’ beauty and fragility; the National Audubon Society has been active since 1905.

John James Audubon (1785—1851) was not the first person to attempt to paint and describe all the birds of America (Alexander Wilson has that distinction), but for half a century he was the young country’s dominant wildlife artist. His seminal Birds of America, a collection of 435 hand-coloured, life-size prints, made from engraved plates, measuring around 39 by 26 inches (99 by 66 cm). It includes images of six now-extinct birds: Carolina parakeet, passenger pigeon, Labrador duck, great auk, Eskimo curlew, and pinnated grouse. Art historians describe Audubon's work as being of high quality and printed with "artistic finesse." The plant-life backgrounds of some 50 of the bird studies were painted by Audubon's assistant Joseph Mason but he is not credited for his work in the book. He shot many specimen birds as well as transporting and maintaining supplies for Audubon. Audubon also authored the companion book Ornithological Biographies.

← Portrait of John James Audubon by John Syme, 1826

The Birds of America was first published as a series in sections between 1827 and 1838, in Edinburgh and London. Not all of the specimens illustrated in the work were collected by Audubon himself, some were sent to him by John Kirk Townsend who had collected them on Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth's 1834 expedition with Thomas Nuttall.

← John James Audubon. Painting: George P. A. Healy; Museum of Science, Boston

The birds of America : Vol. 5 : from drawings made in the United States and their territories / by John James Audubon, F.R.S., etc. — Published by V. G. Audubon, 1856. — 346 p., ill. Source: RSL