Provenance
Painted for John James Audubon [1785-1851]; by descent in the Audubon family to his great-grandson, Leonard Benjamin Audubon [1888-1951], Sydney, Australia;[1] sold 1950 to E.J.L. Hallstrom [1886-1970], Sydney, Australia; gift 1951 to NGA.
Technical Summary
The support is a commercially prepared millboard,[1] primed recto and verso with a proprietary ground of thin opaque white oil paint (on the verso the white is coated with a black layer). Infrared reflectography reveals a thin, dry, pencil underdrawing. The painting is executed in thin, opaque layers, carefully but fluidly applied, with some low impasto in the highlights and nest; there are some pentimenti in the rendering of the grasses. The craquelure in the dark brown paint of the nest and grasses is suggestive of bitumen. The painting is otherwise in good condition; losses are minimal. The thinly applied synthetic resin varnish has discolored yellow slightly.
[1] The label reads: "Rowney & Forster, artists' colourmen, 51, Rathbone Place, London," who advertised themselves as preparing "IMPROVED/Flemish Ground Mill Boards." This was the firm Audubon favored. "I wish you to try first Rowney & Forster and purchase those (the whole I mean) as low and [on] as long a credit as you can" (Audubon to Robert Havell, Jr., 18 November 1830; Howard Corning, ed., Letters of John James Audubon 1826-1840, 2 vols. [Boston, 1930], I: 124).
