American Art Collaborative

Around 1830, John James Audubon commissioned the Scottish artist Joseph Bartholomew Kidd to copy many of his paintings of birds. Audubon hoped to use these paintings in a natural history gallery that would tour England. The project was never completed, however, in part because Kidd took too long to finish the work. In this painting, Kidd directly copied the four birds on a branch from the original illustration, then added a landscape to the background to create an “embellished” painting for Audubon’s proposed exhibition