Customer Reviews

Audubon: Early Drawings

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
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This wonderfully assembled collection of drawings gives you a rare glimpse of Audubon's early years of art and ornithology. Created long before he would achieve fame for his Birds of North America portfolio, these drawings offer insight into his formative years as an artist. Despite the stiffness and naivete of the images, his later brilliance is still very apparent. His natural approach to composition has yet to manifest itself but regardless the drawings reflect his early passion for nature and are a joy to behold.
The volume is finely bound in full buckram with a slipcase. A beautiful book for a discriminating collector.

The Harvard University Press has done a superb job of producing this beautiful collection of Audubon's early drawings of birds and a few mammals. The drawings were made and sold to his patron Edward Harris to help fund "The Birds of America". There are 116 portraits of species collected in America and in Europe.

Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American, contributes an essay on the sources of Audubon's art. There are transcriptions of Audubon's annotations to the drawings, with info on when and where the specimens were collected. There is some information on the animals themselves, and a history of the Harris collection and the important relationship between Harris and Audubon.

Most of all, there are the wonderful drawings. Harvard has put a very representative collection of 12 of the images online at the link which appears in the first Comment to this review.

This book is a great introduction to Audubon's work, arguably the most important contributor to American birding in the 19th Century. It makes an excellent companion volume to Roger Tory Peterson's Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America, undoubtedly the most important contributor to American birding in the 20th Century.

Any book and bird lover should seriously consider adding both of these beautiful books to their libraries.

Robert C. Ross 2008

I have been trying to research the European birds by Audubon for a while. They otherwise receive little more than small mentions and footnotes in journals or articles. The only way to see these would be to go to the Harvard library which I have been unable to do. A reference like this is invaluable to me. The reproductions are terrific, excellent. I am very happy with this book. Even if you are not researching, anyone can browse through it for visual enjoyment. Even when his skills were less developed he had a strong sense of beauty, and they stand out as striking works of art.

The book is a very good review of the work of Audubon prior to the publication of "Birds of North America". The plates reveal the beginning of Audubon growth as an illustrator as he began his career. I believe that this high quality volume would be a great addition to anyone's collection of Audubon work.