White-headed Eagle - a hand-coloured engraving from John James Audubon's The Birds of America, drawn between 1827 and 1838.

Plate 31 of 435, "White-headed Eagle", from The Birds of America, engraved by Robert Havell Jr between 1827 and 1838.

Birds of prey. The raptors are the plates Audubon staked his reputation on, usually shown at the moment of the kill or mantling over it. He drew from freshly taken birds wired into position, which is why the wings hold poses no living bird would sit for.

John 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.

Robert 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.

Prepared 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.