No one would think of John James Audubon (1785-1851) as a miniaturist. He is known, of course, for having created, if not the largest, then certainly the most widely known printed work ever published. The Birds of America — 435 hand-coloured prints, issued in four volumes, each of which might very well weigh, depending on the binding chosen by a subscriber, 50lbs — was published between 1827 and 1838 in London by Audubon and his engraver and printer Robert Havell Jr. Around 120 copies survive today; if sets come up for sale, and they occasionally do, they’re usually priced in the vicinity of $10 million.

Havell used richly textured Whatman paper, manufactured by two different mills, ‘J. Whatman’ and ‘J. Whatman Turkey Mill’, the finest paper available, measuring roughly 39½ inches by 26½  – more than two by three feet. By comparison, Michael Hawley’s Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom (2003), celebrated as the biggest book ever made, clocks in at five by seven feet — ‘nearly as big as a Ping Pong table’, according to a press release. But it only weighs around 130 pounds, less than the 200 a bound set of The Birds of America brings to the scales. Audubon wanted to portray the birds of his adopted country lifesize and so accurately that, in theory, you could pick one up and hold it against Audubon’s representation and the two would match perfectly. Hence his unique method of drawing birds – Audubon would pin a freshly killed bird to a gridded board and then transfer what he saw to a gridded sheet, thus creating a drawing that matched his original 1:1.

Audubon’s obsession with size had its roots in a French-American controversy. In his multi-volume Histoire naturelle, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-88), argued that the climatic conditions in the New World had stunted the size of American animals, a claim that raised the hackles of Thomas Jefferson, who in 1786 had the skin of a moose shipped from Vermont to Paris so that the French naturalist could see for himself that the American species was in fact bigger than the European elk. Yet Audubon’s size fetish was also a form of compensatory boasting. Recent debates have drawn attention to Audubon’s personal shortcomings, notably his racial biases and the fact that, during the time he ran a store in Kentucky, he owned enslaved men and women. Audubon himself was the son of a slaveholder and occasional slave trader, and, born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), he wasn’t even, depending on one’s point of view, reliably French. Audubon’s desire to be known and remembered for having achieved something monumental – as the producer of the biggest, best, most beautiful work on American birds – could easily be seen as an outsider’s quest for dominance in a field where others felt he didn’t really belong (as one of his most vocal critics, George Ord of the Natural Academy of Sciences, wasted no time in pointing out).

There was yet another reason, a more noble, artistic one: Audubon didn’t want to be perceived as scientific illustrator. His art, as demonstrated by references in his journals and ornithological essays, had its roots both in the history of European painting (although his assertion that he studied with Jacques-Louis David was false, he systematically visited museums and felt comfortable invoking Van Dyck or Titian in his writing: ‘I have always imagined’, he wrote in his essay on what has now become the most elusive American bird, ‘that in the plumage of the beautiful Ivory-billed Woodpecker, there is something very closely allied to the style of colouring of the great VANDYKE.’ Audubon wanted to capture that mix of immediacy and sophistication in his work, too. He wanted to create or recreate a relationship with the birds he painted that was so intimate that viewers could imagine themselves alternately looking at a portrait in some fancy art gallery or out in the American wilderness next to him. Audubon’s miniatures viewed up close have some surprising things to say about the relationship between humans and nature — and they also remind us that artists might have something to say to us even if their personal views strike us as repellent.

Audubon’s artistic goals, as well as his bravado, are immediately evident to anyone who sees his plates in their original format, not reduced to the size of a wall calendar, postcard, or internet thumbnail. Just look at some of the best-known plates from The Birds of America — the bald eagle high up on some rocky precipice, perched on the body of a dead catfish (plate 126); his soaring golden eagle, a bleeding rabbit dangling from her talons (plate 181); the whooping crane, bent over so that Audubon can fit that body into his drawing (plate 226; ill. 1); the gangly-legged American flamingo, shown with its neck down, because if the bird decided to rise to its full height, the head would poke far beyond the frame of the picture (plate 431).