Pea-Green Water

The houses on the far shore needed more work. John James Audubon wrote the instruction beside his drawing of a great white heron, directing the engraver to finish them from another original already in his possession. He had requirements for the water, too: it was to have a “Pea-green tint”.

The bird occupied most of the picture. Its long neck bent down and then up towards a fish held across its open bill; the buildings of Key WestKey West, Florida, United States×An island city in the Florida Keys, south of mainland Florida. Audubon visited the area while gathering material for his bird illustrations.Open in Google Maps ↗ made a low line beneath it. Audubon wanted a close match to the depth and colour of the sky. Along the heron's legs and feet, he wanted the divisions between the scales kept white in the engraving. The colour applied afterwards would soften them enough.

These were working orders for The Birds of America, the immense illustrated book Audubon was publishing in Britain. The heron appeared in 1835 as plate 281. Its copper plate was made by Robert Havell, the London printmaker whose workshop engraved, printed and coloured much of the undertaking. The distance between a Florida bird and a subscriber's bound volume passed through decisions as small as the pale edge of a scale.

A pilot's bird

Audubon reached Indian Key, off southern Florida, on 24 April 1832. In his published account, he credited a local pilot, Mr Egan, with first telling him about the white herons. The following day Egan brought in a nest containing two living young and a dead one. Audubon was then occupied with finishing a drawing and had not accompanied him.

Egan's knowledge continued to shape the collecting. He knew places beyond Key West where adult birds could be found, and understood how the rising tide moved them from their feeding grounds. Audubon described boats separating to cover different positions, with an extra shot fired a minute after a successful one to signal that a bird had been obtained.

The individual used for the drawing did not fall at once. Audubon wrote that he heard his shot strike a large heron, which flew on. Later the party found it dying beside another key. He identified this as the specimen from which he made the picture.

The living posture was constructed from a dead bird.

Audubon used freshly killed specimens, arranging them with supports and wires so that he could study their form and paint them in active positions. His pictures might show a bird feeding, fighting or reaching for fruit. Such a composition required decisions beyond recording the appearance of a body laid on a table.

For the heron, the landscape was also a collaboration. The surviving drawing credits George Lehman as another artist. Lehman, a landscape painter who travelled with Audubon, helped supply the setting in which the large bird would appear. The drawing is worked in watercolour, graphite, pastel, chalk and ink, with scratching and scraping among its techniques. Its surface was a place to build and revise a picture before anyone began engraving.

Audubon's notes then addressed what should happen in London. A request to improve the houses presumed that Havell could refer to another piece of material. A direction to soften the upper back concerned the way a white bird met its dark surroundings. The printmaker needed enough information to make those judgements in a different medium.

Lines cut into copper

Publication had begun in Edinburgh in 1827, with William Home Lizars making the first plates. Havell subsequently took over the principal work in London and retouched the early plates. The completed series, issued from 1827 to 1838, contained 435 plates. Audubon's name identified the enterprise, but the lettering beneath its pictures also named the people responsible for engraving, printing and colouring.

The copper held the lines and tones; the colour came later.

In an intaglio print, ink sits in recesses below the metal's surface. The printer wipes the surface, leaving ink in those hollows, and pressure draws it onto the paper. Engraved and etched lines could describe the edge of a feather or a building. Aquatint gave Havell another means of producing areas of tone.

For aquatint, particles of resin protected small areas of the plate while acid bit into the spaces between them. Ink held in the resulting texture printed as a grainy tone. Controlling the bite, and protecting areas that had reached the required depth, allowed pale and dark passages to share the same copper surface. This helped translate the washes and modelling of Audubon's drawings without reducing every shadow to parallel lines.

The printed sheet still required watercolour. A sky could have both an underlying printed tone and colour brushed over it; the heron's feathers could be modelled with delicate marks while much of their whiteness remained the paper itself. Aquatint and hand colouring were separate operations, with different opportunities for error.

Audubon's instruction about the legs anticipated their interaction. If the scale divisions were too dark in the print, later colour would not restore their brightness. Leaving them white gave the colourist something to work over.

Each new impression began another round of colouring.

The workshop needed a standard against which that repeated work could be judged. Surviving pattern proofs carry pencil directions about colour and corrections to lettering. Approved examples helped keep later sheets in agreement, even though each was painted by hand.

Audubon kept the colourers in view even when he was away. Writing to his family from Edinburgh during the final stage of the project, he instructed his son John to attend to them and to call at the bookbinder. Havell was to press on with delivering fourth volumes. Engraving, colouring and binding did not necessarily finish together, and a completed copper plate alone would not satisfy a waiting subscriber.

A closer look · 10:09 · English

From copper plate to coloured bird

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Five sheets at a time

The book reached its first owners in instalments. Audubon's prospectus offered five plates to a number: one large bird, one medium-sized subject and three small ones. Each number cost two guineasGuinea×A former British unit of money equal to one pound and one shilling (21 shillings).Merriam-Webster · guinea ↗, payable on delivery. Across the completed series there were 87 numbers, so a subscriber who remained throughout paid 174 guineas before binding.

Large and small birds shared an unusually large paper format, known as double elephant folio. The intention to show birds at their natural size made that space useful for a heron; smaller subjects could occupy a modest patch of the same great sheet. The prospectus advised owners to keep their accumulating prints in a portfolio until a volume was ready to bind.

Sending a mixture of sizes distributed the work as well as the birds. In May 1838, the New York bookseller William A. Colman wanted six large, difficult plates. Audubon refused the special order: printers and colourers would demand an exceptional price for the extra work. If any copies remained when the undertaking was finished, Colman might have them. He was not to count on it.

Collecting payment was another continuing task. In May 1839 Audubon told Havell to withhold the last seven numbers from the ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte until he paid both an old balance of £8 18s 6d and the price of the new instalments. Scientific standing did not settle the account.

Lucy had been earning while the project still lacked subscribers.

After the family's business failures, Lucy Audubon taught in Louisiana to support their household. Her paid work helped make possible the years her husband devoted to collecting, drawing and seeking a publisher. A business dependent on paper, copper and skilled hands also depended on the money and care that kept its family going.

Their household's recovery included the purchase of an enslaved woman, Cecelia, and her sons Ruben and Lewis. Audubon had owned and sold enslaved people earlier in Kentucky, and continued to defend slavery. Lucy's earnings and the family's exploitation of other people's labour belong to the same economic history; the surviving record does not establish what became of Cecelia and her sons.

The sheets travelled into libraries and private houses, where they could be assembled into a book carrying a single celebrated name. The original drawings and the tools used to multiply them later took different routes. In 1863 Lucy sold the drawings to the New-York Historical Society. The copper plates were sold as metal.

Years afterwards, Charles A. Cowles described encountering them as a boy at a Connecticut refinery, around 1873. In his account, he noticed a bird's foot on a sheet being put into a furnace. Cleaning the plate with acid revealed the Black Vulture. He said his appeals to the foreman, superintendent and his own father, the general manager, initially failed; he nevertheless secured the removal of plates that had not yet been melted.

They remained until the next annual inventory reopened the question. Cowles then enlisted his mother, who went to the factory and recognised what they were. According to his recollection, his father instructed that the plates be kept intact.