Audubon and Union College

Title

Audubon and Union College

Transcript

Union College President Eliphalet Nott demonstrated his characteristic progressive nature when he purchased a complete set of the four-volume, double-elephant-folio, The Birds of America, from Audubon in the summer of 1844. The artist was visiting the campus to tour fellow naturalist and Union professor, Captian Issac Jackson's garden.

Nott's tremendous purchase remained safely within the care of the college library until Commencement 1971, when the entire contents of Volume One of The Birds of America, on display in a locked glass case in the library for the weekend's festivities, was wrenched from its cover and case by two thieves, leaving a bloody trail as evidence of their deed. The prints, some bloodstained and severely torn, were eventually recovered with the help of the FBI and a rare book dealer from Texas. The harrowing recovery tale has received some controversy of its own in recent decades, and the reliability and possible culpability of the book dealer, John Holmes Jenkins, who was ostensibly murdered in 1989, has been called into question. The Audubon portfolios remain one of Union's most precious Special Collections holdings today.

The New-York Historical Society eventually purchased the entire cache of 474 original watercolors Audubon painted as a preparatory studies for The Birds of America, acquiring 470 from Lucy Audubon in 1863. Of these watercolors, 435 served as models for the final Havell engravings for The Birds of America, but thirty-nine were not included for a variety of reasons. The Schaffer Library at Union College has recently purchased, with gifted funds from alumnus David Seeley, a member of the class of 1970, twelve facsimile prints from these thirty "to complete our flock." Seeley made this gift in honor of former College President Harold Martin. These full-size replicas were printed using the original watercolors, which have been on display recently in an on-going, three-part exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, Audubon's Aviary: The Complete Flock, 2013-2015.

Union College is also fortunate to have recently acquired another group of facsimiles, this time of the final Havell engravings, rather than the original watercolors, from a 1985 collaboration between the National Audubon Society and the Abbeville Press. To produce this group of full-size facsimiles of all 435 prints to commemorate Audubon's 200th birthday, the Audubon Society's copy of The Birds of America was used and the printing was done in Tokyo, Japan on paper from New York's own Mohawk Paper Company.

- Sarah Mottalini
Exhibition Assistant, Union College Permanent Collection & Mandeville Gallery