INSPIRED NATURALIST

A SMITHSONIAN SHOW CELEBRATES THE SCIENCE AND ART OF AMERICA'S BIRDMAN, JOHN JAMES AUDUBON

"Audubon's Birds of America is a book which everyone has heard of and which everyone wants to see at least once in his lifetime." Thus, in 1888, wrote George Brown Goode, assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, about the stunning and still famous masterwork produced by John James Audubon (1785-1851). So it seems only fitting that the Smithsonian is offering everyone a chance to see the so-called double-elephant folio edition of The Birds of America, which Audubon and a team of British printers, engravers and colorists laboriously assembled between 1827 and 1838. This massive volume, one of the 200 originally printed,...

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