Farmyard Fowls

A large white rooster with a scarlet comb lowers his head to peck at the ground, while one hen sits on a round white egg inside a wooden coop and another perches on the roof watching him — cream, brown and pale yellow feathers against a near-black background, the earthen floor scattered with straw. John James Audubon, the naturalist whose Birds of America made him the most celebrated painter of birds of his age, also worked in oil, and this rare easel painting, made about 1827 at the height of his fame, shows the same exacting eye for plumage and posture that drove his great ornithological project. The canvas descended through the artist’s family to his son John Woodhouse Audubon and grandson William Bakewell Audubon, who carried it to a sheep farm near Yass, Australia, in the 1880s; his grandson Leonard Benjamin Audubon sold it in 1950 to Sir Edward Hallstrom of Sydney, who gave it to the National Gallery of Art in 1951. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.