Arts
As the publication of his masterpiece The Birds of America wound down, an exhausted but restless John James Audubon embarked on his final project to catalogue the mammals of North America. The result was The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, which comprised 150 folio color prints of American mammals, the first of its kind published in the United States. Katie McKinney, the Margaret Beck Pritchard Assistant Curator of Maps and Prints at Colonial Williamsburg, examines the creation of this under-appreciated work and its place in the study of American natural history.