Great Footed Hawk

The plate was engraved and hand-coloured by Robert Havell Jr. and published in London between 1827 and 1838 as part of the double-elephant folio edition of Birds of America, Audubon's landmark contribution to both natural history illustration and American visual culture. At the time of publication, Audubon was working to secure subscribers among British naturalists and aristocrats, and the dramatic, life-sized renderings of North American birds represented a deliberate argument: that the continent's wildlife was as worthy of serious scientific and artistic attention as any subject in European natural history. The Peregrine Falcon plate was among the most admired for its compositional daring, depicting not a perched or flying bird in isolation but a scene of predation with full narrative force. The Birds of America folio is now regarded as one of the most valuable printed books in the world, with complete sets fetching tens of millions of dollars at auction, and individual plates held in the collections of institutions including the New York Historical Society, the Smithsonian and the Natural History Museum in London.