John James Audubon made it his mission to draw all the birds in America. His work was published in 7 volumes in the early 1800s. For me, it is such a definitive, dedicated body of work that all other bird illustration that I like stems from here. In thinking of 10 images for this list, many of the ones I thought of were bird-related, but Aubudon's work is the real deal.
The books contained hand-coloured, LIFE SIZE prints, made from engraved plates. The amount of work gone into these is astonishing. A copy sold at Christie's in 2000 for nearly $9,000,000. I would very much like to own one of these. The Natural History Museum owns a full set, I wanted to go see them whilst Jake was still working there. Hopefully that can happen in the future.
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