Lot Essay
In the summer of 1810 John James Audubon settled in Henderson, Kentucky with his wife Lucy Bakewell Audubon. At this time in his career Audubon was actively sketching various birds, though he had not yet conceived of his systematic project to record all the birds of North America. T.E. Stebbins has written, "During the first and second decades of the nineteenth century, when American landscape painters were busy painting prospects of cultivated land and views of country seats of the wealthy, before the Hudson River School existed, Audubon plunged into the wilderness to paint the beauty and richness of America through its birds. He explored the whole of the young nation, from Key West to the northern tip of Maine and beyond, from New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston to the wilds of Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Louisiana, travelling as no American artist had before him. He would awake, as he said, 'on the alder fringed brook of some northern valley, or in the midst of some yet unexplored forest of the west, or perhaps on the soft and warm sands of the Florida shores, listening to the pleasing melodies of songsters innumerable.'" (John James Audubon: The Watercolors for the Birds of America, New York, 1993, p. 6)