Lot 126: * JOSEPH BARTHOLOMEW KIDD, AFTER JOHN JAMES AUDUBON CIRCA 1801-1889

MATERIAL/MEDIUM
oil on canvas

26 by 20 1/2 in. (66 by 52.1 cm)

Painted <EM>circa</EM> 1831-33.

Mrs. John James (Lucy Bakewell) Audubon
By descent to the present owner

Ron Tyler writes, "With production of his book [The Birds of America] underway, Audubon now turned to other tasks. First was the sale of enough oil copies of his bird and animal paintings to provide for his immediate survival. While watercolors were adequate for the engraver, collectors treasured oil paintings, perhaps for their permanence as opposed to the fragility of watercolors, but Audubon never mastered the medium. The chance acquaintance of a nineteen-year-old artist, Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, whom [British engraver William H.] Lizars had employed to fill in the sky behind one of Audubon's bird paintings, seemed to offer a partial solution: Kidd agreed to copy Audubon's birds in oil, both for sale and for a proposed traveling exhibition by which Audubon hoped to earn enough money to support production of the Birds" (Audubon's Great National Work: The Royal Octavo Edition of The Birds of America, Austin, Texas, 1993, pp. 15-16). Audubon supplied Kidd with specifically sized canvases for his copies, which were completed between 1831 and 1833, and the dimensions of the present work are consistent with the recorded size of those canvases. All of the Kidd copies were in the possession of the Audubon family by 1833.