{"product_id":"passenger-pigeon-plate-62-audubon-birds-of-america-print","title":"Passenger Pigeon · Plate 62 · Audubon - Birds of America Print","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePassenger Pigeon\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 62 of 435, \"Passenger Pigeon\", from The Birds of America, engraved by Robert Havell Jr between 1827 and 1838.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe Passenger Pigeon.\u003c\/strong\u003e Audubon watched flocks darken the sky for three days at a stretch and estimated a billion birds in one passage. The last of them died in 1914, which makes this plate a record of a species nobody alive has seen.\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\u003eWorked up from a high-resolution scan of an original Havell plate, straightened and cleaned of library furniture so nothing but the engraving reaches the paper. Each print is made to order on cotton-fibre archival paper, then mounted with a wide even border and hand-framed in our workshop rather than sent out.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Natural History Room","offers":[{"title":"50cm x 61cm","offer_id":55471312961877,"sku":"THENATURALHISTORYROOM062-M-50X61","price":61.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0886\/6414\/6261\/files\/gallery-0_53883987-299a-4978-a7b8-798833bce1b9.jpg?v=1792652907","url":"https:\/\/theposteredit.com\/products\/passenger-pigeon-plate-62-audubon-birds-of-america-print","provider":"The Poster Edit","version":"1.0","type":"link"}