John James Audubon did not know that no Occidental artist before him had painted bird life on such an heroic scale, or had recorded such animated, informed likenesses of birds in their different habitats. And he felt with growing conviction that no one who came after him would have the same opportunity to make such a report on the birds of America. The primeval haunts in which they flourished so abundantly and so variously were already vanishing in Audubon’s day.
—Audubon did two versions of the Bald Eagle – he decided he didn’t like the first one enough, so he made a new one. The two were hanging side by side, and you could see the difference adn superiority of the second painting. The eagle is in the same pose and the same size in both, but in the orginal, he is killing a Canadian Goose with his talons, but the dead fish he kills in the second painting is far more gory and gross. Which is why he chose it.—click image for source…
Also, he realized that to reach a wider audience than might ever see these paintings- and to gain some financial reward for his years of dedicated labor- he ust publish for sale engraved copies of his work. This he did, first with a series of full-scale prints prepared for the most part by the English engraver Robert Havell Jr., and then with other reproductions in smaller sizes produced in Philadelphia by means of lithography. Both were successful publications.
—In distributing its 435 plates, he followed a nineteenth-century practice of issuing them serially by subscription in eighty-seven fascicles (groups) of five prints. In a brilliant marketing ploy, Audubon packaged each group of five engravings to represent three small, one medium, and one large, spectacular species. The latter fully exploited the double-elephant-size paper, the largest then available, used for the prints and the watercolors of the biggest birds. In the first grouping, the piece de resistance was the magnificent Turkey Cock whose model he painted in watercolor in 1825. Three of the other four preparatory watercolors date from an intense early period of studying birds in the company of his best pupil from Cincinnati, Joseph Mason (1808–1842), who painted many of the botanical specimens during 1821–1822. All five prints after these watercolor models were initially engraved by William Home Lizars (1788–1859) in Edinburgh and retouched later by Robert Havell Jr. (1793–1878) in London.—click image for source…
Indeed, the larger Havell prints in particular are now rare and costly collector items. They are commonly mislabeled Audubon “originals,” which of course they are not in any strict sense of the term. Since then, reproductions of Audubon’s birds have largely been copies of those copies, or copies of copies of such copies in almost endless proliferation, until the essential qualities of the man’s art are altogether lost, basically descending it on a scale that could be equated with Norman Rockwell Americana.
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