{"product_id":"common-american-swan-plate-411-audubon-birds-of-america-print","title":"Common American Swan · Plate 411 · Audubon - Birds of America Print","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCommon American Swan\u003c\/strong\u003e - a hand-coloured engraving from John James Audubon's The Birds of America, drawn between 1827 and 1838.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePlate 411 of 435, \"Common American Swan\", from The Birds of America, engraved by Robert Havell Jr between 1827 and 1838.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWaterfowl.\u003c\/strong\u003e The swans and geese are among the largest subjects in the work and pushed the double elephant sheet to its limit. Audubon set them low on the water so the whole bird stays within the plate.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJohn James Audubon spent twelve years shooting, wiring and drawing every bird he could find in North America, then took the results to Britain because no American engraver could print them at the size he insisted on. The Birds of America was issued between 1827 and 1838 as 435 hand-coloured plates on double elephant folio sheets, close to a metre tall, engraved and coloured in London by Robert Havell Jr. The scale is the point: Audubon drew every species life-size, which is why the flamingo stoops and the heron cranes, and why these compositions still fill a wall the way a photograph rarely does.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRobert Havell Jr engraved and hand-coloured the plates from 1827, taking over the work after the first ten. The line is aquatint over etched copper, the colour laid on by hand plate by plate, so no two impressions of the same subject are quite identical.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePrepared from a high-resolution scan of an original hand-coloured plate, cleaned of the mount and the folio's binding shadow before printing. Made to order on heavyweight cotton-fibre archival paper and sold at a single size, mounted with an equal border all round and framed in-house.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Natural History Room","offers":[{"title":"24cm x 34cm","offer_id":55471319449941,"sku":"THENATURALHISTORYROOM411-M-34X24","price":33.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0886\/6414\/6261\/files\/gallery-0_0e9a6bc6-b12c-4590-bdaa-dd1641a93bd1.jpg?v=1792653338","url":"https:\/\/theposteredit.com\/en-us\/products\/common-american-swan-plate-411-audubon-birds-of-america-print","provider":"The Poster Edit","version":"1.0","type":"link"}