The 435-plate work, drawn by Audubon and reprinted and tinted by engravers, took some 14 years to complete, but transformed the artist with a prickly personality into a celebrity in Europe, which embraced him as a novel, rough-hewn American. Audubon returned to America, which now welcomed him.

The artist later tried to revisit that fame with a follow-up series of animals, “The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America,” but it didn’t match the popularity of “Birds Of America” and he died in Manhattan before its completion by his sons.

“John James Audubon: Life, Work & Legacy” shows how the detailed drawings, accurate colors and lifelike poses of Audubon’s work set it apart from those of his contemporaries. In a pre-photographic age, most ornithologists relied on stuffed dead birds for their detailed studies. Audubon also used birds that he killed for his studies, but employed wire to put them in poses suggesting flight, noted Jones.

He relied on subscribers to underwrite the costs of his print series, with subscriptions at $1,000 — the equivalent of some $25,000 today — entitling them to periodic deliveries of five prints in various sizes, boxed in wooden and tin crates. Subscribers often later would have their prints bound into book form.