Virginian Partridge

Audubon began serious work on Birds of America in the early 1820s, and Plate 76, Virginian Partridge, was engraved and published in London by Robert Havell Jr. around 1827 to 1830 as part of the double-elephant folio, one of the largest and most ambitious publishing projects of the 19th century. By that period Audubon had adopted the practice of posing freshly collected specimens with wire armatures, allowing him to arrange multiple birds in life-like attitudes that conventional naturalist illustration had never attempted. The Northern Bobwhite was among the most familiar game birds of the American South and East, and its inclusion in the folio carried both scientific and cultural weight: it was a bird every subscriber would recognise, shown here in circumstances every sportsman and farmer would understand. The Birds of America plates belong to the Natural History Illustration tradition in their function, yet Audubon pushed the genre toward something closer to dramatic storytelling, and this plate stands as one of his most overtly action-driven compositions. The folio is now held in major collections including the National Audubon Society, the New-York Historical Society, and the Smithsonian, and complete sets have sold at auction for record sums in the tens of millions of dollars.