A bird taller than the paper
Audubon’s heron prints are among the largest and most dramatic plates in The Birds of America, because the birds were drawn at life size on a sheet that was not quite big enough for them. A heron is a tall bird with long legs and a long, heavy beak. The Great Blue Heron stands well over a metre from head to toe, and its wings span close to two metres in flight. The largest paper Audubon could get, double elephant folio, measured about 39 by 26 inches, roughly 100 by 67 centimetres.
For a warbler the sheet was a field; for a heron it was a cage. Audubon’s solution was to bend the bird. The Great Blue Heron stands with its wings slightly spread and its head bent down towards the water, as if about to strike, so that the whole bird fits inside the margins and the pose looks like hunting rather than cramming.
Herons in their own landscape
Audubon also insisted on showing each bird where it lived. He watched the species he wanted to draw for hours, days and sometimes years, and wrote everything down in his journal. Herons live by water and eat frogs and fish, and so the Night Heron of plate 236 stands over its catch at the water’s edge.
He knew that herons nest in trees, so the Yellow-crowned Heron of plate 336 perches among branches. Where the male and female differed in plumage, or the young looked unlike their parents, he drew both, which is why so many of his plates hold two birds.
Diagonals and S-curves
Audubon was self-taught, but he understood composition. Look at his plates and you will keep finding the diagonal: a line running from one corner towards the other that gives movement, depth and tension to the picture. He also used what artists call motion composition, curves and S-shaped lines that make the eye travel. The lines are everywhere once you look for them: in the horizon, the reeds, the branches, and in the bird itself.
A heron, with its long legs, long body and long beak, is the perfect subject for this. The Great White Heron of plate 281 is almost all S-curve: the neck folds back on itself and the body stretches along the length of the sheet, with the roofs of Key West small in the distance.
Watercolour and pastel, then copper and brush
A word about materials, because two different objects are involved. Audubon’s originals are drawings: research into his method shows that he usually began in graphite, as an underdrawing, and built the colour up in thin layers of watercolour. Over the years he added other materials, gouache, chalk, ink, oil paint and sometimes collage, and he used pastel to give the fine, fluffy plumage of herons and owls its softness.
What subscribers received, and what we reproduce, is not the drawing but the plate: Robert Havell’s engraving and aquatint on copper, printed in black and coloured by hand by his colourists, following Audubon’s original. The softness you see in the plumage of the White Heron below is Havell’s translation of Audubon’s pastel into aquatint and watercolour. Our facsimiles are made from the hand-coloured plates in the copy of the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, not from the watercolours, which are in New York.
Which heron to hang
Audubon devoted about a dozen plates to herons, egrets and bitterns, from the Least Bittern to the Great Blue Heron, and they are among the most asked-for plates in the book. Each of our facsimiles is printed at the size of the original sheet, 67 by 100 centimetres, in an edition of 250, numbered in pencil and embossed with our blind stamp, and ships unframed, rolled in a tube. Audubon’s largest plates sets the herons beside the flamingo, the swans and the pelicans; all the plates are on The Birds of America.
Audubon’s herons
Questions
Why are Audubon’s herons bent over?
Because he drew every bird at life size on a sheet of about 100 by 67 centimetres, and a heron standing upright is taller than that. Bending the neck down, as if hunting, kept the bird inside the margins.
How many herons did Audubon paint?
About a dozen plates of The Birds of America show herons, egrets and bitterns, among them the Great Blue Heron (211), the Louisiana Heron (217), the Night Heron (236), the Great White Heron (281), the Yellow-crowned Heron (336) and the White Heron (386).
Are the heron prints made from Audubon’s watercolours?
No. They are facsimiles of the hand-coloured engraved plates by Robert Havell in the copy of The Birds of America at the Teylers Museum in Haarlem. Audubon’s original watercolours are in New York.