Audubon Plate # 73, Wood Thrush  $200

Click small image to see more detail

Paper size: 26 1/4" x 39 1/4"; image size, or the space taken up on the paper by the image: 12" x 18 1/2"

Based on a composition painted on April 21, 1822.  Joseph Mason worked on the background.

"This bird is my greatest favourite of the feathered tribes of our woods.  To it I owe much," Audubon wrote, and added a lengthy sentence of explication.   "How often has it revived my drooping spirits, when I have listened to its wild notes in the forest, after passing a restless night in my slender shed, so feebly secured against the violence of the storm, as to show me the futility of my best efforts to rekindle my little fire, whose uncertain and vacillating light had gradually died away under the destructive weight of the dense torrents of rain that seemed to involve the heavens and the earth in one mass of fearful murkiness,..."  He concluded, "...how fervently...have I blessed the Being who formed the Wood Thrush, and placed it in those solitary forests..."

The most familiar of our spotted, woods-dwelling brown thrushes, and the only one that frequently makes his home near human habitations, surely the wood thrush has one of the clearest and sweetest songs ever to float from a woodland edge on a summer day.   Thoreau wrote of it:  "Whenever a man hears it he is young, and Nature is in her spring;..."  EHJ