The five prints, hung in The
John Crerar Library's first-floor reference area, are reproduced
from John James
Audubon's The Birds of North America,
published between 1827 and 1839. Most copies of the work were sold
by subscription to patrons solicited personally by Audubon in
England and America, King George IV and the Library of Congress
being among the first subscribers. Commonly known as the Double
Elephant Folio because of its extraordinary size, Audubon's work
contains 435 carefully hand-colored etchings, usually bound into
four volumes. These were produced in two of the most reputable
printing shops of 19th century England from watercolor drawings
which Audubon prepared from his own field studies.
It is not uncommon for illustrated works in the history of
science and medicine to transcend the boundaries between technical
illustration and art. The production of Audubon's
Birds exemplifies the process where a
desire for an intensely accurate description of nature results in a
work of major artistic stature. The Folio, popular from the
beginning because of its brilliant coloring and highly original and
naturalistic compositions of birds in their native habitats, has
often been broken up and the plates sold individually. Only about
130 complete sets are known to survive today.
The John Crerar Library copy of the Double Elephant Folio was
owned in the 19th century by Henry Probasco,an avid book collector
of Cincinnati, Ohio. Probasco was not among the original 
subscribers and no earlier provenance for this copy is
known. It was brought to Chicago by the Newberry Library in 1890
and subsequently acquired by the Crerar Library in 1898. Complete
restoration and restabilization of the work was completed in 1995
and made possible by a grant from the University of Chicago Women's
Board. The Crerar copy is housed in the Department of Special
Collections in the Joseph Regenstein Library where it may be
consulted by appointment.
The species represented by the five prints are Key West Pigeon, or
Dove (Geotrygon chrysia, upper right),
Boat-tailed
Grackle (Quiscalus major (Icteridae )),
Reddish
Egret (Egretta rufescens (Ardeidae), lower
right), Golden-winged
Woodpecker(Picus auratus, state bird of
Alabama other common names: Northern Flicker or Yellowhammer,
left), and Winter Hawk (Falco hyemalis). Other
images (and some selected text) from
Birds may be found on the Audubon Society
website at http://www.audubon.org/bird/BoA/BOA_index.html.
