Part II: Treasures in the storage unit
Solving an Audubon art mystery
Part I of this story left off with an art mystery to solve: aside from its personal value, was the print of John J. Audubon’s “Horned Grebe” recovered from my dad’s storage unit a significant piece of art?
Audubon prints are legion, ranging from rare and museum-caliber to mass-produced poster decor. Its patina and likely source in my grandmother’s parents gave me a hunch this one might be closer to the former. An internet search identified the Rare Prints Gallery in nearby Franklin, TN, of all places, as having reputable expertise in antique prints, so I picked up the phone.
“Hi,” I said. “I’ve inherited an Audubon print, and I’m hoping you can help me determine if it’s a special one. Its provenance suggests that it might be.”
“Ah,” the woman at Rare Prints Gallery replied. “Happy to help, though I can tell you it almost certainly isn’t. There are a lot of Audubon prints out there. We field this question a lot.” Her voice was friendly.
“I understand,” I said. “but could we schedule a time to take a look? I’m just up the road in Nashville.”
“Of course! Though we may be able to clear this up now and save you the trip, if you have a minute.” I agreed. The framed picture was right in front of me, laid flat on a clean towel. “First,” she said, “what is printed immediately under the picture?”
“From left to right,” I began:
Drawn from Nature by J.J. Audubon. F. R. S. F.L. S.
The letters after Audubon’s name indicate he was a Fellow of the Royal Society (F.R.S.) and a Fellow of the Linnaean Society (F.L.S.), prestigious scientific societies of the time. Before modern photography, art and science were, by necessity, far more integrated. A self-taught artist, hunter, amateur naturalist, and experienced taxidermist, Audubon’s studies and renderings of birds in the North American wild were uniquely valuable to scientists. These post-nominal credentials spoke to his credibility not only as an artist, but a naturalist.
Horned Grebe Podiceps Cornutus, Lath.
Adult Male, 1. Female Winter Plumage, 2.
The birds’ common name (Horned Grebe) is followed by its Latin scientific name (Podiceps Cornutus) indicating genus and species, with an abbreviated credit to John Latham, an English ornithologist, for classification (Lath.). The first bird, on the left, is an adult male. The second is a female in winter, when the Horned Grebes’ plumage is muted, presumably for camouflage.
The fine, speckled effect visible in the colored portion of this image is made by aquatint, a technique similar to etching that adds tonal values — shading and texture — to the print.
I continued reading aloud:
Engraved. Printed, & Colored by R. Havell, 1835.
“Havell 1835?” she repeated. I confirmed.
London engraver Robert Havell made the very first engravings for The Birds of America from 1827–1838, transferring Audubon’s original watercolor paintings as hand-engraved mirror images onto rectangular copper plates. The completed prints were then circulated among dozens of watercolorists, many of them young women, each responsible for filling in a single color. A master colorist made final changes to every one, such that no print is exactly alike.
“What are its dimensions?” she asked.
“Based on the frame, roughly 38 x 25 inches,” I said.
She was quiet for a moment. “Okay, we need to get a close look at that paper.”
“Shall I open it up?”
“Do you feel comfortable doing it? If not, please don’t…”
“Yep. I’ve worked with art and antiques for years,” I explained. “I just don’t know much about assessing prints.”
“Oh, good!” she said, clearly relieved. “Yes, open it — and let’s hope it wasn’t glued to a board,” she groaned. Sadly, many past conservation efforts imposed a remedy worse than the problem. “We need to confirm the paper dimensions.”
The Havell engravings for the original edition of The Birds of America were made on large, double elephant folio paper (approximately 39 ½ x 26 ½ inches) to accommodate Audubon’s life-size renderings of the birds. The size approximation allows for sheets’ sometimes being trimmed in binding or by owners of individual prints, to remove tears or fit into a frame.
I put her on speaker phone and turned the picture face down on the towel. “Look for any watermarks,” she said into the room. “This is key.” The Havell engravings were made on paper produced by James Whatman in Turkey Hill, County Kent, England. I was looking for marks like these:
There also should be a ghostly imprint around the entire image, as if the paper were embossed, due to the immense pressure on the copper plate.
Using a clean utility knife, I carefully slit the brown paper backing along 3 edges of the frame and peeled it back to find a piece of ordinary box cardboard. Lifting it out, I could see where the acid leaching from the cardboard had left a dark shadow on the print’s paper. That was not all.
“The watermark’s here,” I said. “J Whatman 1835.”
“It is?!” She was openly excited now, voice ringing around me. “Oh my goodness. Wow! I’ve been looking at people’s prints for 20 years, and I’ve never been surprised by an original!”
“It is exciting,” I said distractedly, mesmerized by the watermark in the weave of the paper, imagining how it was made, and chosen by Audubon and Havell for this monumental project. I hadn’t even turned it over yet, to see the picture itself.
“How’s the picture? Any foxing or mold? Folds or tears?” she asked. I snapped out of my reverie and turned the paper, gently fingering the edges and scanning it closely.
“None of those,” I said. “But the image is very dark. Considerable acid leaching from a cardboard layer. But no glue or tape.”
“Oh that’s good news,” she breathed. “I can refer you to a terrific restorer for cleaning, if you like. She’s in Atlanta. I’ve worked with her for years and trust her completely.” She paused before letting out an excited yelp. “You found an Audubon!” I laughed, thanking her for her help. “Are you kidding?” she said. “This was entirely my pleasure! Where did it come from again?” I told her the story about my grandmother giving it to my parents, and how the print likely belonged to my great-grandparents before her. They’d lived near Boston. She was an artist; he was a botanist; and they’d collected some fine pieces. “And now it’s in Tennessee,” she marveled.
I couldn’t wait to tell Dad this story. I only wished Mom were here, too. I could see her bright-eyed excitement glowing in my own mind’s eye.
The name Audubon sounds a bit fusty, bringing to mind a dog-eared, past-date calendar of wildlife photographs. The original Mr. Audubon was anything but.
As a young man, John James Audubon (1785–1851) emigrated to America from France to manage a farm outside of Philadelphia, but management was neither his gift nor his passion. Rather, his lifelong curiosity about the natural world drew him into the wild — and where better than America — to observe wildlife, particularly birds, in their native habitats. There he sketched, journaled extensively, and hunted in order to study specimens more closely. He learned taxidermy. He developed innovative ways to position and pin specimens so that he could draw or paint them as they appeared in life.
As his other efforts to make a living continued to fail or fizzle, Audubon went all in on his passion and declared his intention to paint every bird in North America. But this wouldn’t pay the bills, much less for itself. His family was barely scraping by as it was. Audubon would have to find funding for his grand idea, and it was no easier then than it is for visionary entrepreneurs today. After failing to secure sponsorship in Philadelphia, Audubon set sail for England in search of patronage, leaving his family behind.
Then as now, the trick to finding investors is telling the story, painting the picture, that persuades them to believe in the vision and want to see it come to life. Timing is everything. With James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans all the rage in London, Audubon understood the part he needed to play. Sophisticated and connected enough to get in the door, thanks to his upbringing, Audubon was also eccentric, exotic, and entertaining enough to capture imaginations as a man of the American wilderness. He also had more than 200 watercolor paintings to show and a plan for how to make them more broadly available — yet still highly exclusive, being of the finest taste and quality.
Audubon proposed to sell copper engravings of his watercolor paintings on a subscription basis, a business model developed in the 17th century for books and periodicals. For $1,000 (then enough for a large, well-appointed house), paid in installments over a period of about ten years (1827–38), each subscriber to The Birds of America would receive five hand-colored engravings at a time: three smaller birds, a larger bird, and a mid-sized bird. Each group of five prints issued was given a part number (i.e., part X of 87 total groups). Each print in the group was given an individual plate number for a total of 435 (87 parts of 5 prints each).
After years of patching together odd jobs, a stint in debtor’s prison, his wife working as a governess while tending home and family in his steady absence, Audubon landed on a successful enterprise centered around the work he loved most in life: observing birds in their natural habitats and painting them with exquisite attention to their conditional appearance and behaviors.
Far from fusty, Audubon is considered by many to be a quintessential American entrepreneur, disrupting accepted protocols of scientific illustration and opening the world’s eyes to miracles of nature they’d otherwise never see.
Audubon sold 186 subscriptions to the complete folio of The Birds of America. Of the original edition printed by Robert Havell, it is thought that no more than 120 complete sets exist today, the others divided into individual prints in public and private collections around the world.
Truthfully, I’d never given prints much thought, never considered the Horned Grebe picture for anything other than its association with my parents.
For most eyes today, antique prints are easily overlooked, forgettable if registered at all. Our world is visually saturated with digital media, vivid and fast and limitless. We’re conditioned to value the big and the bold. Constant busy-ness denotes purpose and industry; pausing to follow the languid lines or peer into the hatched shadows of an antique print goes against our current.
Antique prints are like poetry, not novels. Distance runners, not sprinters. They are the introverts of fine art, often rich with insight, humor, and beauty. They offer an illuminating foil to the big, bold, and colorful paintings and sculptures that quickly capture our attention.
Often used in decor, antique prints’ subtlety and patina soften sleek, modern spaces without compromising their minimalism. They add a touch of old world elegance to hip and shiny places without ever stealing the show. Frequently architectural or botanical, we rarely notice them, much less squint to decipher their archaic script. Pictures of flowers, insects, and birds seem easily dismissible, even precious. And yet — the tiniest flower or insect can be deadly, and birds are dinosaurs. A masterpiece could be hiding in plain sight.
I met Sandra at the gallery to examine the print with a jeweler’s loupe and confirm its authenticity. While removing it from the acid-leaching mat and backing materials would arrest the damage, the print needed professional cleaning to restore its intended appearance. We packed it up and sent it to her colleague in Atlanta.
Despite knowing that submerging prints in liquid is a standard cleaning procedure, not to mention an aspect of the paper arts in general, it still made me anxious. After a few weeks, I called to check on its progress.
“It’s here in the tank, coming along nicely!” The restorer’s no-nonsense Southern voice and easy manner reminded me of a Kathy Bates movie character (not the horror ones). Her response to my questions was something like, “you just soak it till it’s done,” sounding like a lifelong cook with little use for recipes. Basically, when she thought the paper and image looked as close to true as was safe to attempt, she would lift it out and dry it carefully to prevent buckling or shrinkage.
Sandra sounded positively giddy when she called to tell me the Audubon had arrived back at the gallery. “The change is stunning,” she gushed. I could kick myself for not taking before-and-after pictures, or losing them if I did, but the transformation was rather like this:
I don’t know how long we just sat and looked at it. Imagining each line being etched into the copper plate. Hearing the creak of the press. Picturing all the painters, each applying their assigned color before passing it to the next. The finishing touches applied by a master. Havell and Audubon examining the final work, before this picture went into the now unknown — somehow arriving in my great-grandparents’ care more than a hundred years ago.
“Horned Grebe” is an excellent example of what was unique (and controversial, to some) about Audubon’s renderings. As a committed naturalist, Audubon adhered to the standards and expectations of science at the time, depicting birds life-size with exacting detail and in their natural habitats. In order to document the seasonally distinct plumage of Horned Grebes, Audubon included two birds in the picture: the male on the left displaying the colorful mating plumage, and the female on the right wearing its winter feathers. This provided valuable, factual information about this particular bird.
Yet by depicting the Horned Grebes as a couple, together at water’s edge, Audubon creates a visual narrative that all kinds of viewers can relate to. The scene’s seasonal impossibility is irrelevant to — and probably lost on — those of us without avian expertise. Audubon’s art spoke not only to the rigors of science, but to human empathy of any time or place.
Both as an artist and an entrepreneur, Audubon instinctively understood the importance of meeting an audience where they are, telling the story in a way they specifically would understand and appreciate. Subscribers, scientists, artists, and viewers alike could then carry forth with information, perspective, insight, or another creative endeavor. The transformative current of art would continue its flow through people and across time.
For an exceptional digital experience of fine art prints, I highly recommend visiting https://www.audubonart.com/.
And for a different sort of story, also published this month: Augie Goes to the Beach: a Make-a-Wish Trip for our senior dog
