Audubon Collection

Pebble Hill’s collection of prints from the first edition of Audubon’s Birds of North America is one of the Nation’s finest.

Melville Hanna bequeathed Pebble Hill to his daughter Kate Hanna Ireland Harvey in 1901. Miss Kate loved South Georgia, the beauty of the area, the flora and the fauna. Her interest in South Georgia wildlife, led to her acquisition of the Audubon prints. The Pebble Hill prints feature birds that live in South Georgia or pass through on their yearly migration. Miss Kate became Pebble Hill’s first major fine art collector.

John James Audubon was born in Santo Domingo, the son of a wealthy French sea captain and plantation owner. He spent most of his youth at his father’s French chateau with his step mother while his father sailed the world for the French government and even fought in America’s Revolutionary War. John wasn’t particularly interested in school and spent most of his days wandering the country side, collecting interesting rocks, bird’s nests, plants etc. Additionally, he spent hours drawing the birds that flocked to his father’s estate. His comment, “I commenced a series of drawings of French birds, which I continued until I had upwards of two hundred drawings, all bad enough, my dear sons, yet they were representations of the birds, and I felt pleased with them.”

He decided he would focus on the birds of North America and make a career of it. He traveled down the Mississippi with an artist specializing in plants and insects, Joseph Mason. They traveled from Cincinnati to New Orleans. John recorded his birds life-size, in dramatic poses and in natural settings. Lucy Birdwell Audubon, John’s sturdy wife, worked as a tutor for the children of wealthy plantation owners to support the family.

Audubon used watercolor with pastel and often gouache to create the original paintings. And although he preferred to paint the birds in the wild, he was not above shooting one and wiring its body into a position that would allow him the show all the bird’s characteristic markings. In 1826 John left for England to find sponsors and an engraver to turn his paintings into a saleable portfolio of prints. He found a printer in Scotland who engraved about ten plates, William Lizars, then moved the job to the London firm of Robert Havell & Son. Havell’s black and white intaglio prints were then colored.

The prints were sold as a subscription series with the subscribers receiving five plates at a time. Each set of plates included one large life-sized, one medium and three small birds. Subscribers received their first set of prints in 1827 and the last in 1838. The final total was 435 plates containing 1,065 birds of 489 species. The plates were double elephant size, 39 ½” x 29 ½”. The first plate printed was the largest bird, the wild turkey. Audubon traveled back and forth between America and England during the printing process to provide new material and make sure the quality was to his specification.

A complete list of Audubons in the Pebble Hill collection is available for download.

For additional information about Audubon and his art, visit this site.