Audubon's Watercolors for The Birds of America

In 1863 Lucy Bakewell Audubon, the widow of John James Audubon, sold to The New-York Historical Society her husband’s preparatory watercolors for his seminal work The Birds of America (published serially in London between 1827 and 1838). The Society owns all 435 known preparatory watercolors for its 435 plates. In addition, the N-YHS holds a rare, double-elephant edition of The Birds of America, as well as the octavo edition and Audubon's Ornithological Biography, letters, ephemera, etc. In aggregate, these collections in the museum and library form the largest single repository of Auduboniana in the world.