The Passenger Pigeon

Artist John James Audubon (American, 1785-1851)

Place of OriginUnited States

Date1829

Dimensions30 3/16 × 26 1/8 in. (76.6 × 66.4 cm)

Mediumetching, aquatint

ClassificationPrints

Credit LineMuseum Purchase

Object number

1921.112

Not on View

DescriptionAquatint (colored by hand).

Label TextSince his childhood in France, Audubon had enjoyed sketching birds. In 1820—seven years after he moved to America—he conceived of the idea of turning his interest in birds into a business. With the ambition of surpassing the efforts of naturalist Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology (1808–14), Audubon set out to paint every known North American bird and to publish the results. Wilson’s seminal work had illustrations of 268 species, several of which had never before been described. Audubon would eventually stop at 435 paintings of 489 species after he exhausted his personal resources. Audubon’s watercolors were translated into hand-colored etchings by the London firm of Robert Havell & Son and published as The Birds of America. Each bird was shown life size and printed on the largest paper available at the time (the double elephant folio). Sets of five etchings each were issued to subscribers over a period from 1827 to 1838. Today, no more than 120 complete sets are known (one such set recently sold for $11.5 million, making it the most valuable book in the world). Audubon’s influential innovation was to pose the birds as he thought they moved in the wild and to show them in their habitats, often in pursuit of their food sources. He made extensive field notes of the birds’ behavior, which he later published as the Ornithological Biography. In 1829 Audubon wrote of seeing so many migrating flocks of Passenger Pigeons that “the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse.” According to 19th-century accounts, the species was once more numerous than all other species of birds in the United States combined. And yet it was famously extinct by the first decade of the 20th century, a victim of over-hunting and deforestation. In his Ornithological Biography describing the behavior of the birds he studied, Audubon wrote of the Passenger Pigeon, “the tenderness and affection displayed by these birds toward their mates are in the highest degree striking.” He illustrates this observation in this image of a pair engaging in the pre-mating behavior of “billing,” in which the female (above) receives regurgitated food from the male (below).Exhibition HistoryToledo Museum of Art, American Art in the Time of Homer, November 26, 2008-January 25, 2009.

Toledo Museum of Art, The Painter Was a Printmaker, June 23-Sept. 9, 1984.

Toledo Museum of Art, For the Birds, April 13-October 14, 2012.