Lot 16: *JOSEPH BARTHOLOMEW KIDD (C. 1801-1889)/AFTER AUDUBON PIGEON HAWK (FALCO COLUMBARIUS)

oil on canvas 26 1/4 by 20 3/4 in.66.7 by 52.7 cm. While visiting Pennsylvania during the spring of 1812, Audubon first recorded the Pigeon Hawk in a watercolor which depicts a single male bird. Thinking the species to be newly discovered, he named it Le Petit Caporal. As Audubon explained: "The name which I have given to this new and rare species was chosen at the time when Napoleon le Grand was in the zenith of his glory. Everybody knows that his soldiers frequently designated him by the nickname of Le Petit Corporal, which I thought more suitable to our little Hawk, than the names Napoleon or Bonaparte, which I should have adopted, had I been so fortunate as to procure a new Eagle." In 1829, Audubon executed a second watercolor of this subject (23 1/8 by 18 inches; New York Historical Society, New York), which depicts both a male and female bird. It is most likely that this work served as the basis for the present painting. Audubon is known to have made or commissioned oil copies of certain watercolors in order to help finance the publication of The Birds of America underway in London at this time. According to Mary Tyler Winters, Joseph Kidd painted this work on commission from Audubon between November 1830 and April 1833. "It is on one of the sizes of canvas which Audubon supplied to Kidd in 1830 (Howard Corning, ed., Letters of John James Audubon, Boston, Club of Odd Volumes, vol. 1, p. 124). This image appears on Audubon's list of drawings sent to Kidd for copying in oil on July 29, 1831 (Waldemar Fries, The Double Elephant Folio, Chicago, 1973, Appendix C, p. 362, "75 petite corporal"). Mrs. Winters further states "I have compared [this] image with the Kidd after Audubon oil versions of the Junco and Maryland Yellow Throat at the Audubon Museum in Henderson and the Flicker and Passenger Pigeon at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. The backgrounds compare closely in concept: they lie in a band along the bottom of the picture, they are disjunct in scale between the birds and the trees and hills in the background, they are painted in the same color palette of tawny yellows and dark blue beneath a luminous orange blush sky, the birds and habitat are exact copies of the Audubon drawing." Furthemore Mrs. Winters states "It is well known that John James commingled his and John Woodhouse's and Kidd's oil pictures on his selling trips in 1840-1843 in New England and Canada (Howard Corning, ed., Journals, 1840-1843, Boston, Club of Odd Volumes, 1929). Maria Audubon in her preface to John James Audubon and His Journals commented on this practise (Maria Rebecca Audubon, John James Audubon and His Journals 1840-1843, vol. I, p. 65). The later affidavits for sale purposes of Lucy Audubon Williams, another granddaughter, have been discredited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and others." As in the earlier watercolor, in the oil the birds grasp a leafless branch, the male tensely poised above the female whose outstretched wings reveal delicate markings. In addition to its plumage, the birds" distinctive character is captured through each nuance of their particular movements, faithfully recorded by Kidd. The added landscape against which the birds are juxtaposed lends the work a sense of drama and immediacy entirely in keeping with Audubon's work which conveys the power and vitality of nature. A letter from Mary Tyler Winters accompanies this lot. Provenance: Mrs. John James Audubon C. W. Butlee, New York (acquired as a gift from the above) John E. Thayer Descended directly in the family to the present owner Exhibited: Greenville, South Carolina, Greenville County Museum of Art; Columbia, South Carolina, Columbia Museum of Art; Charleston, South Carolina, Gibbes Art Gallery, Expressions of Nature in Art, November 1975-February 1976, no. 1 Literature: Annette Blaugrund and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Editors, John James Audubon, The Watercolors for The Birds of America, New York, 1993, p. 314, watercolor illustrated in color.