Arctic Hare

By 1841 Audubon had largely completed the celebrated Birds of America (1827 to 1838) and turned his ambitions toward a comparable survey of North American mammals, undertaken with the Scottish naturalist John Bachman. The resulting work, The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, was issued in parts between 1845 and 1848, with a three-volume text by Bachman following through 1854. The Arctic hare plate belongs to the preparatory campaign of that decade and demonstrates Audubon's ability to adapt the compositional strategies he had honed for avian subjects to the very different formal problems posed by terrestrial mammals: bilateral symmetry, the depiction of camouflage, and the challenge of conveying two colour phases of a single species within one image. The tradition he was working in, traceable through Mark Catesby and George Edwards, positioned the plate as simultaneously a scientific record and a work of graphic art. Audubon pushed both ambitions further than any predecessor had in the American context, and the mammal plates, though less celebrated than the bird folios, are regarded by natural history art historians as equally accomplished within the natural history illustration genre.