Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Ivory-billed Woodpeckers by Joseph Bartholomew Kidd After John James Audubon

Recently, I decided to try and find a portrait of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers by John James Audubon that I recalled seeing on display in one of the exhibit halls at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City a long time ago. I had no luck finding it again at the museum during periodic visits. However, it turned out that it was easy to locate the portrait online. When I did so, I learned that this curiosity was actually an oil on canvas creation painted by Joseph Bartholomew Kidd around the year 1830 that was fashioned after Audubon's watercolor. The painting is currently on display in Gallery 774 at the museum, a gallery which you can surely find by asking one of the museum personnel for its location.

The museum has information on this piece online, and here is an excerpt:

Audubon made his watercolor of the ivory-bill...before 1826, and commissioned Kidd to copy it and other of his bird subjects in oil for display in a traveling exhibition Audubon planned but never realized. The copyist added the landscape background.

Click here to read more about this painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's site.

1 comments:

Bob Bushell said...

Beautiful painting.