In 1804, at the age of nineteen, John James Audubon stood in a cave in Pennsylvania looking at a pair of eastern phoebes and had an epiphany: “I looked so intently at their innocent attitudes that a thought struck my mind like a flash of light, that nothing, after all, could ever answer my enthusiastic desires to represent nature, except to copy her in her own way, alive and moving! On I went, forming, literally, hundreds of outlines … I continued for months together, simply outlining birds as I observed them, either alighted or on the wing.”

Audubon’s childhood fascination with drawing birds became his obsession. He wandered the woods and rivers of the wild frontiers of North America shooting, studying, posing, and painting every species of bird he could find, and many years later, the resulting books were to change the worlds of ornithology and natural-history art forever. Using a variety of materials to create a highly dramatic style, he painted almost 500 species of the 700 or so regularly occurring North American bird species and is today considered one of the greatest bird artists of all time.