ABSOLUTE AUDUBON!
(The only image
where Audubon composed all three elements himself, the bird, the
background, and the flora. Uniquely Audubon!)
Pinnated
Grous, plate 186 $450
Print size: 26 1/4" x 39 1/4";
image size: 34 1/2" x 24 1/2"
This painting was
probably done in 1824, when Audubon was near the Great Lakes. It
depicts two males fighting over a female and is one of the few works in
which Audubon drew all three of the compositional elements: birds,
plants, and landscape. Of the tiger lily Audubon wrote: "This
beautiful plant,...grows in swamps and moist copses, in the Northern and
Eastern States, as far as Virginia, as well as in the western
prairies,...I was forced to reduce the stem, in order to introduce it
into my drawing, the back ground of which is an attempt to represent our
original western meadows."
The greater prairie
chicken, found in such abundance by the artist when he lived in
Kentucky, is now uncommon and seriously declining over much of its
range. During the mating season the males in a given area gather in the
early morning on courtship grounds, there to display before the
females. As described by Dr. Frank M. Chapman: "The feather-tufts on
either part of the neck are erected like horns, the tail raised and
spread, the wings drooped, when the bird first rushes forward a few
steps, pauses, inflates its orange-like air-sacs, and with a violent,
jerking, muscular effort, produces the startling boom, which we may have
heard when two miles distant." The booming note is much like one made
by blowing across an empty bottle.
Click the small
partial image to see more detail.
