John James Audubon. Snowy Owl, Plate 121.

Perfect Recreation of:

AUDUBON, John James (1785 - 1851).
Snowy Owl, Plate 121.
Aquatint engraving with original hand color.
London: Robert Havell, 1827-1838.

Paper Size: 26" x 39"

A haunting masterpiece with a thunderous sky in the background, created with octopus ink.

James Audubon’s “Snowy Owl” is one of the most desirable images from his monumental Birds of America: one of his very few nocturnal scenes, and certainly one of the most vibrant and charming full-page illustrations of his 435-plate series. “At home in the far North, the snowy owl sits upon its hillock, surveys its bleak domain, and intones its baleful booming to the polar sky... About every fourth year flights of these big ghostly owls drift into the United States; at longer intervals invasions of thousands pour across the border. Persecuted by trophy hunters, few survive the winter and make the return trip.” - (Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, 1831).

John James Audubon, is without rival, the most celebrated American natural history artist.  Audubon devoted his life to realizing his dream of identifying and depicting the birds of North America, and his work has had profound cultural and historical significance.  In the second decade of the 19th century, he set out to travel throughout the wilderness of the United States, drawing every notable species of native bird. His remarkable ambition and artistic talent culminated in the publication of the monumental Birds of America in 1827-38, a series of 435 aquatints that have only grown in fame since the time of their first appearance. This work established Audubon as an early American artist who could attract European attention, and for many, he personified New World culture and its emerging independent existence.  
 
 Audubon was born in Haiti, the illegitimate Creole son of a French sea merchant and a local chambermaid. He was raised in France until 1803, when his father sent him to the United States to avoid being drafted into the Napoleonic wars. There he started what proved to be a long run of unsuccessful schemes. He tried to run a lead mine in Pennsylvania. It folded. After marrying, he opened up a store in Louisville and it, too, went under. He started a steamboat line, and it led him into bankruptcy. By then he was 35 and, he admitted to his wife, a failure. 
 
But throughout his life he nourished a passion for the study and illustration of bird life. At the time, marketing was not as unlikely an endeavor for Audubon as it might seem today. It was a respectable, if somewhat chancy, business, and natural history was a popular subject; in fact, Audubon faced considerable competition. He had little formal training in art and even less in ornithology, but what he lacked in experience he made up for in braggadocio. He pursued his birds with an unusual passion for accuracy and painterly beauty, a fervor caused as much by desperation as by scientific and aesthetic high-mindedness. For years he tracked his subjects to the known edges of the country; the journals he kept along the way are a literary achievement in themselves. By his death in 1851, he had completed 584 individual studies, 435 of which appeared in The Birds of America.

PERFECT RECREATIONS: 

Our Perfect Recreations are Archival Pigment Prints that are printed on Innova Etching Fine Art Cotton Rag Paper using Archival Watercolor Pigment Inks.

Viewed side by side - with the naked eye or under magnification - our Perfect Recreations™ are indistinguishable from the originals. The closer you get, the better they look. They completely and convincingly re-create the experience of seeing the originals.

Each Perfect Recreation™ has it all: every incredibly fine line detail of every Antique Map; every delicate watercolor brushstroke of every Audubon and every Botanical; even the subtle signs of char-acter and patina the paper shows after as much as 500 years.
Our prints are not posters; they are not reproductions -- they are Perfect Recreations as jaw-drop-ping beautiful as the originals. They are identical to the originals, and your response to them will be identical to your appreciation for the great original artworks.

We have pioneered proprietary techniques and technologies to capture and print at the highest resolution ever achieved -- our works typically provide more than ten times the detail of any previous fine art reproduction. We perfectly recreate color and texture nuances - even the sense of luminosity. We mix and apply archival watercolor pigments to the highest quality archival papers to deliver legacy-quality Perfect Recreations™

Bespoke framing available - please reach out to us to discuss framing options.