AUDUBON - Watercolors at the NY Historical Society through March 16

STALKING THE ELUSIVE WATERCOLOR

By FRANCIS MORRONE The New York Sun

Violence was a daily fact of life in the world of John James Audubon (1785–1851). Animal slaughter, disease, the rigors of backwoods life, and travel all made up close and personal varying levels of violence from which modernity insulates us.

Even though Audubon set out with a gun to shoot birds in order to be able to pose them for their portraits, a large part of his life was consumed by tender dreams of birds, which appeared to him in his sleep and fired his imagination with an obsessive force.
Many noble heads of birds grace the walls at the New-York Historical Society, which, through March 16, offers the latest in its extraordinary sequence of exhibitions, which draw from the society's collection of the original watercolors painted for the double-elephant folio print edition of Audubon's "Birds of America" (1827–38). (see complete article in the New York Sun)