Drawn from Nature: Audubon’s North American Mammals

Hawks Pavilion Works on Paper Gallery H5 The celebrated naturalist John James Audubon traveled widely during the nineteenth century, studying North America’s wildlife. After completing his famous Birds of America , Audubon embarked on an equally ambitious project: The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America . Cataloguing every four-legged mammal north of the Tropic of Cancer, Audubon’s lengthy treatise, co-written with the Lutheran minister and naturalist John Bachman, was accompanied by 150 large-format prints that brought their evocative descriptions to life. Squirrels scramble up tree limbs…