Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Rose-Breasted Grosbeak
Joseph Bartholomew Kidd (Scottish, born Edinburgh, Scotland ca. 1808-died Greenwich, England 1889)
n.d.
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 26 1/4 x 20 3/4 in. (66.8 x 52.7 cm)
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U. S. National Museum
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
Around 1830, John James Audubon commissioned the Scottish artist Joseph Bartholomew Kidd to copy many of his paintings of birds. Audubon hoped to use these paintings in a natural history gallery that would tour England. The project was never completed, however, in part because Kidd took too long to finish the work. In this painting, Kidd directly copied the four birds on a branch from the original illustration, then added a landscape to the background to create an “embellished” painting for Audubon’s proposed exhibition.