PHILADELPHIA, PA--(Marketwire - July 29, 2010) - In 1824, three years before he began to publish his famous The Birds of America, John James Audubon, the eminent artist of American birds and animals, created a drawing of a running grouse for use in the design for a New Jersey bank note. Although the artist mentions the drawing and the resulting engraved paper money in two separate diary entries, no one has ever been able to locate or identify such an illustration. Now, after a decade-long search by an Audubon scholar from Philadelphia and a numismatic historian from St. Louis, Audubon's first published illustration of a bird has been discovered.
In a forthcoming article in the Journal of the Early Republic, Robert Peck, Curator of Art at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and Eric Newman, an authority on American money, reveal their discovery and explain how Audubon's fledgling entry into the visual world of commerce took place.
Several of Audubon's biographers have searched in vain for the bank note Audubon mentioned. Unable to find the evidence of Audubon's claim, some scholars have dismissed it as a red herring, invented by Audubon (a frequent embellisher of his own achievements) to burnish his reputation in the lean years before publishing his landmark book, The Birds of America.
Now Peck and Newman's research on the nineteenth-century American banking and the engraving companies that furnished paper money at the time confirm the reliability of the artist's assertion and explain how forces beyond his control denied Audubon the numismatic immortality he craved. The ill-fated Audubon grouse image, which the authors found on engraved bank note sample sheets in a private collection, did eventually make its way onto proof bank notes made for at least two independent banks, but because these banks were in Connecticut and Ohio and were made years after the artist's initial contact with Fairman, they were not detected as being by Audubon until now.
Audubon's First Bird Engraving Discoved
