The British couldn't get enough of his images of backwoods America and its natural attractions, as he toured around England and Scotland. Audubon was lionized as "The American woodsman" and raised enough money to begin publishing his Birds of America.

This monumental work consists of 435 hand-colored, life-size prints of 497 bird species, made from engraved copper plates measuring around 39 by 26 inches.The work is far from a complete atlas. There are just over 700 North American bird species.

The pages were organized for artistic effect and contrasting interest, as if the reader is taking a visual tour. (Some critics thought he should have organized the plates in Linnaean order as befitting a "serious" ornithological treatise.)

The first and perhaps most famous plate is the Wild Turkey, which had been Benjamin Franklin's candidate for the national bird, losing out to the Bald Eagle.

The actual cost of printing the entire work was $115,640 (over $2,000,000 today), all paid for from subscriptions, exhibitions, oil painting commissions, and animal skins he hunted and sold.

Audubon's great work was a remarkable accomplishment. It took over 14 years of field observations and drawings, plus his single-handed management and promotion of the project to make it a success. A reviewer wrote, "All anxieties and fears which overshadowed his work in its beginning had passed away. The prophecies of kind but overprudent friends, who did not understand his self-sustaining energy, had proved untrue; the malicious hope of his enemies, for even the gentle lover of nature has enemies, had been disappointed; he had secured a commanding place in the respect and gratitude of men.

Each color was applied by a colorist in assembly line fashion (over fifty were hired for the work). This original edition was engraved in aquatist by Robert Havell junior, who took over the task after the first ten plates engraved by W. H. Lizars were deemed inadequate. Known as the Double Elephant folio, it is often regarded as the greatest picture book ever produced, and the finest aquatint work. The aquatint process was largely replaced by lithography by the 1830s.

Audubon sold oil-painted copies of the drawings to make extra money and to further increase interest in the book. He also had his portrait painted by John Syme, who clothed the naturalist in frontier clothes, and the painting appeared at the entrance of the exhibitions and added to Audubon's rustic image (the painting currently hangs in the White House.

All 435 of the preparatory watercolors for Birds of America are currently housed at the New York Historical Society in New York City.

Lucy Audubon sold them to the society after her husband's death. All but 80 of the original copper plates were melted down when Lucy, desperate for money, sold them for scrap to the Pheps Dodge Corporation.

Source: Wikipedia