Bending their mighty necks into ungainly contortions, the cranes and flamingos of John James Audubon’s astounding 19th-century book The Birds of America offer stately examples of why this artist-naturalist has become the biggest name in the history of ornithological art. His masterwork, printed on ‘double elephant’ sized paper (around 40 by 27 inches), was the first to show each specimen in life-sized scale. As a result, even on this roomy canvas, the leggiest, longest-necked species of bird demanded a certain creativity in positioning to fit them in.
Although Audubon was by no means the first to paint birds – paleolithic owls daubed
