Rocky Mountain Sheep · Plate 73 · Audubon - Quadrupeds of North America Print

Rocky Mountain Sheep - a hand-coloured lithograph from John James Audubon and John Bachman's The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, issued between 1845 and 1848.

Plate 73 of 150, "Rocky Mountain Sheep" (Ovis Montana), from The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, lithographed and hand-coloured by J. T. Bowen of Philadelphia between 1845 and 1848.

The hoofed animals. The deer, sheep and goats are set in the mountain, forest and prairie country they come from, with the landscape given more room than anywhere else in the work.

The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America was Audubon's last great work, made with the naturalist John Bachman, who wrote the text. Its 150 plates were issued between 1845 and 1848 on imperial folio sheets, the smaller animals drawn life-size, and lithographed and coloured by hand by J. T. Bowen in Philadelphia. As Audubon's eyesight failed, his son John Woodhouse Audubon drew many of the later plates, travelling as far as Texas to find his subjects.

Each plate is a hand-coloured lithograph rather than an engraving: Bowen's printers drew the image on stone and his colourists finished every sheet by brush, which gives the fur its soft depth and makes each impression slightly different from the next.

Prepared from a high-resolution scan of an original hand-coloured lithograph, keeping the full sheet as it was issued, caption and all. Printed on archival cotton-fibre paper when your order is placed, and mounted with a border of equal width on every side so the plate sits centred in the frame.