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IN 1803, a young Frenchman called Jean-Jacques Audubon sailed to America to avoid conscription into Napoleon’s army. Thirty-five years later, he was the revered ornithological artist , “the American woodsman”, author of the magnificent . Before that book made him famous, he had spent decades trying to find a way to make his birds appear to fly off the page. This collection of 116 early drawings, published together for the first time, shows that while his early birds didn’t quite take off, they did have a delicacy and charm that somehow went missing from his later masterworks.

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