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‘Audubon’s Aviary: The Final Flight’ Alights at the New-York Historical Society

Goldeneye ducks in distress after one has been mortally wounded.Credit...New-York Historical Society

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON painted many birds, but for sheer stage presence, his great gray owl is hard to beat. Perched on a rotten branch, it turns halfway, as though disturbed, and fixes the viewer with an imperious stare. The yellow eyes glow, their intensity magnified by concentric ringlike markings that spread outward, like a feathery vortex. The plumage is regal — thick drapery, in a gray and brown pattern, falling in soft folds. The owl exudes the heavy solemnity of one of Velázquez’s popes or Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More.

The owl has stiff competition in “Audubon’s Aviary: The Final Flight.” This is the third and final annual installment of the New-York Historical Society’s exploration of the 435 watercolors that Audubon executed for “The Birds of America,” a series of engraved, hand-colored prints that appeared between 1827 and 1838. Together, they count as one of the supreme achievements of American art and the crown jewel in the museum’s collection.

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A roseate spoonbill.Credit...New-York Historical Society

The exhibition, which opens on Friday, has presented Audubon’s watercolors in the same order that he shipped them to his engraver in London, Robert Havell Jr., and onward to the subscribers, who paid the princely sum of $1,000 (about $25,000 in today’s money) for the set. The prints arrived in monthly packages of five works, on a paper size known as double-elephant (about 40 inches by 30 inches).

The first part of the museum’s trilogy, “Audubon’s Aviary: The Complete Flock,” in 2013, led off with the wild turkey, the first plate in “The Birds of America,” and the grand marshal, as it were, in Audubon’s avian parade. “Audubon’s Aviary: Parts Unknown” told the middle of the story last year. Now, the last bird crosses the finish line, the American dipper. Like many of its fellows in “The Final Flight,” the dipper hails from the West, and brings Audubon’s great project to a fitting close, completing a geographic trajectory spanning the continent. “You have the country growing, and you have him growing,” said Roberta J. M. Olson, the museum’s curator of drawings, and the organizer of the exhibition.

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The American flamingo.Credit...New-York Historical Society

After it completes a renovation of the fourth floor in 2016, the museum plans to open an Audubon gallery devoted to rotating installations drawn from its large collection of Audubon watercolors, prints and related material. The new gallery will help solve the problem of how to make Audubon’s watercolors available to the public permanently.

“We have to do it,” Ms. Olson said. “This is part of the national patrimony.”

The keynotes of the current exhibition are profusion and variety. Hung in a single, compact gallery on the museum’s second floor, the show underlines the natural wealth of the American land, and Audubon’s remarkable talent for producing art as varied as his subject matter. Birds are all, in one sense, the same: two feet, one beak, two wings, lots of feathers. It was one aspect of Audubon’s genius to vary the formula and cast his actors in compelling, unforgettable roles.

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The great egret is the bird the Audubon Society adopted as its symbol.Credit...New-York Historical Society

He had a flair for the dramatic. The common tern, one of his more famous subjects, plummets in a kamikaze dive, beak open and a wild, predatory look in its eye. There is a touch of Milton Avery in the generalized blue-gray background that could be sea or sky, with a light-gray area that could be cloud or beach. The effect is disorienting and dizzying.

Two black rails, secretive and diminutive marsh birds, look ready to run right off the edge of the paper. The adult, bent forward, digs in like a runner breaking from the starting blocks, pursued eagerly by an adorable black chick with downy feathers.

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Audubon’s great gray owl exudes the heavy solemnity of one of Velázquez’s popes or Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More.Credit...New-York Historical Society

They race in a white void. Audubon sometimes filled in his backgrounds, but often Havell or other collaborators fleshed out the watercolors, relying on roughly penciled outlines or, in this case, starting from scratch. In the completed engraving, the rails emerge from swaying green marsh grasses and head across a brown patch of ground toward water. One of Audubon’s most action-packed watercolors shows two ducks — common goldeneyes — arrested in midflight. The lead duck, a male, has been mortally wounded, presumably by a hunter, and is starting to twist and fall, a drop of blood dripping from its beak. Its female companion, eye opened wide in terror, brakes furiously to avoid a collision, flapping her wings and backpedaling with her feet. The print made a huge impression on Winslow Homer, whose last great painting, “Right and Left” (1909), shows a pair of goldeneyes about to crash into a choppy ocean after being brought down by a hunter.

Audubon usually captured quieter moments. He was a close observer and faithful recorder of bird behavior in its day-to-day ordinariness, but he imparts a certain liveliness even to placid scenes. His semipalmated plover, for example, perches on an egg-shaped rock, and, in pursuit of a tiny snail, tilts forward at a rakish angle.

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The common tern was one of Audubon’s more famous subjects.Credit...New-York Historical Society

The snail is one of those incidentals that come as a gift, like the horned lizard from California that appears, off to the side, as a Swainson’s hawk pounces on a rabbit, or the random beetle floating against a white background, as a white-tailed kite prepares to inhale it. “Who would have expected such things from the woods of America?” the French artist François Gérard said on seeing Audubon’s work in 1827.

The birds talk. With a remote control, visitors can press the three-digit code printed on each wall plaque and hear the recorded cry of the bird in question. On one wall, a screen shows film of 11 of the species in the show going about their daily routine in the wild.

Audubon did not explore the Western United States until 1843, after “The Birds of America” was completed. When painting species from the West, he relied on borrowed specimens and the observations of other naturalists and travelers, like Lewis and Clark. Even east of the Mississippi, he ran into snags. He had observed the American flamingo in the Florida Keys but failed to find a specimen. Finally, one dried flamingo and two preserved in spirits were shipped from Cuba. The flamingo’s dimensions presented challenges even for the double-elephant page, but Audubon came up with a graceful solution, arranging his model in a stalking pose, hunched over and striding, beak to the ground and close to its front leg.

The other Audubon superstar is the great egret, which the Audubon Society adopted as its symbol. Snow white, with a lemon-yellow beak, it perches on a dead branch against a gray sky, head turned backward over its body and its neck forming an S-curve. The tail feathers show an uncanny eye and hand for fine detail. The long, fine spines seem fussy enough, but growing from each one are hundreds of extensions, finer than the finest human hair, and all rendered meticulously in Audubon’s watercolor.

Still, elegance isn’t everything. Consider the light-mantled albatross. There it stands, uncomprehending, with a round, foolish eye, thick bill, splayed yellow feet and a plump body that, in human terms, says “couch potato.” The bird is not lovely. But Audubon endows it with a bulky charm, like one of George Stubbs’s prize steers. On a wall stacked with pulchritude, the albatross manages not only to hold its own but also to radiate a strange sort of charisma. “I too am a Bird of America,” it seems to say.

“Audubon’s Aviary: The Final Flight (Part III of the Complete Flock)” runs through May 10 at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, at 77th Street; 212-873-3400, nyhistory.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: Two Wings, One Beak, Infinite Drama. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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