In 1827, when Lady Isabella Hertford finally installed the hand-painted Chinese wallpaper the Prince of Wales had gifted her two decades earlier, she thought it didn’t have enough pizzazz for her drawing room at Temple Newsam in Leeds, England.
john james audubon
Posted inArt
How Audubon Pranked a Fellow Naturalist with a Bulletproof Fish
Field books capture essential information for ecological history but are often difficult to track down in scientific collections.
Posted inArt
An Italian Muralist Recreates Audubon’s Journey, One Bird at a Time
An Italian street artist is retracing the journey of John James Audubon that led to his historic 19th-century tome, Birds of America.
Posted inArt
A Guide to the 19th-Century Artists’ Graves of New York City
Cemeteries are like indexes of a city’s history, listing the names of its deceased from famous to forgotten in an endless litany.
Posted inArt
Photographers of a Feather Flock to Audubon Competition
John James Audubon used to pin dead birds to the wall and quickly sketch them before they rotted. The resulting watercolors, a marriage of science and art, have influenced countless bird lovers since.
Posted inArt
All of Audubon’s ‘Birds of America’ in One High-Resolution Flock
This digital version of Birds of America draws you back into Audubon’s world while emphasizing the need for conservation today.
Posted inArt
Giving Thanks with John James Audubon’s Beloved Turkeys
A turkey isn’t the kind of animal that typically evokes strong feelings. Few of us carnivores interact with it unless we’re eating it.
Posted inArt
The Tombs of Artists: A Last Statement From the Grave
As a last final statement, artists’ tombstones don’t disappoint. From the wildly eccentric to those that incorporate their own creations, the graves of artists are a fascinating reflection of their work.
Posted inArt
Manhattan’s Art of the Dead
New York City’s population of the dead, like its living souls, has mostly relocated to the outer boroughs due the overcrowding and high real estate prices of Manhattan. Many of the island’s cemeteries were exhumed (although the bodies were not necessarily all collected, resulting in some skeletons lingering in the ground) during the past 150 years and reinterred in these new cemeteries, but there remain a few burial grounds embedded in the urban landscape of Manhattan, from gated lots so small as to be unnoticed, like First Shearith Israel Graveyard, the only surviving 17th century structure in Manhattan, to Potter’s Fields that have since become parks, including Washington Square Park and Bryant Park. The borough’s remaining active cemetery is Trinity Cemetery in Washington Heights, which, with Trinity and St. Paul’s churchyards in Lower Manhattan, is part of the Episcopal Parish of Trinity Church burial grounds, a group of three cemeteries that maintains a historic and artistic presence for memorial history in the city.
