The Snow Bird

Not every Birds of America plate needed drama: the snow bird — what's now called the dark-eyed junco, a common winter visitor across most of North America — gets a quiet, modestly scaled composition, two birds perched on a bare red mulberry branch against nothing but open page. Audubon painted juncos during his years working the Mississippi frontier, where the birds' arrival each autumn was a reliable, unremarkable seasonal marker rather than a rare sighting worth theatrical staging. What to notice: the empty white space surrounding the birds is itself a compositional choice, not an absence of one — after plates crowded with a dozen parakeets or a pair of hawks locked in combat, Audubon knew a small, plainly perched bird sometimes reads truer left alone on the page.

Maker

John James Audubon (engraved by Robert Havell Jr.)

Date

1827

Medium of the original

Engraving

Original held by

Wikimedia Commons

Credit

Wikimedia Commons

Rights

Public domain, verified

Catalogue number

PA-00283