Collectors of a Feather

Local couple has Audubon holdings to make any bird nerd green

Bill and Peg Steiner’s collection is mostly birds, but Audubon painted quadrupeds, too, including a peccary (left) and a group of buffalo.
Photo by Audrey Goforth

By his own admission, Bill Steiner is a “psycho bird watcher.” He and his wife Peg have traveled all over the world to catch prime avian activity. “We’ve been to every state in the union, Australia, and Africa twice,” Steiner reports. Despite its reputation for biodiversity, Western North Carolina, he admits, is not the best area for bird watching, being too far inland for most water fowl or rare species.  

But inside the Asheville home they built in 2004, birders will find fertile ground indeed. In a dedicated room is a cache of original prints from John James Audubon’s monumental color-plate book, The Birds of America. As far as Steiner knows — and he keeps tabs — it is the largest existing collection of its kind.

Mississippi Kites

His interest in wildlife goes back to his childhood in Richmond, Virginia. “When I was a kid, I was the boy down the street you called to get a snake out of your basement,” he says. “I was always a nature boy. I had lots of aquariums full of wild and native fish; I was a bird watcher from a young age. My grandmother gave me a little 8 by 10 book of Audubon’s best prints, and I was fascinated by them. My college degree is in biology, but I also took a course in ornithology. The professor said that Audubon’s prints were worth a lot of money.”

Bonaparte’s Gulls

His biology degree led him to a long career in the Environmental Protection Agency’s hazardous-waste enforcement division in Atlanta, but birds remained a personal passion. In 1993, he and Peg bought their first three Audubon prints from a gallery in New Orleans. Researching his purchases, he was disappointed in the lack of information available on the prints, so in his scant free time, he started making calls to museums and dealers, scouring the Internet and compiling what he found. His “hobbyist” manuscript came to the attention of the University of South Carolina Press, which, after mindful, academic editing, published his Audubon Art Prints: A Collector’s Guide to Every Edition in 2003. All 900 hardcover copies sold out within a couple of weeks to museums, libraries, and collectors, though paperbacks are still available.

Bill Steiner holds a print of an American Bittern.
Photo by Audrey Goforth

A complete Birds of America book would have contained 435 hand-colored, 39.5” by 28.5” prints of 497 bird species. Each print began as a watercolor by Audubon and the process from his hands to finished product was complex, taking several weeks just to create the copper plate for printing.

The resultant black-and-white prints went next to a large, light-filled room for coloring by men of varying levels of talent. “There was a master print up front and everyone used that as a guide, and everyone used the same pots of paints, for color consistency,” explains Steiner. “Apprentices did the easy part, maybe a thin layer of brown paint [to represent the ground], dodging the feet. Journeymen would have done the grass, and the masters did the actual birds.”

While the overall print was the same, because each is hand colored, there are many variations and subtle differences. “If you look at the grass, for instance, you can see where one guy went a little too far over the end of the blade, and another not far enough. Some collectors look for the prints with the worst mistakes — they’re the ones they want!”

To support Audubon’s costly endeavor, subscriptions to the series were sold in England and the United States, resulting in roughly 185 complete sets. Subscribers received new prints every month or two, in sets of five. The subscriber price, says Steiner, was about $2 a print, so all 435 would have totaled $870, with an additional $130 for the red leather binder lined with marbled paper.

A gathering of Brown Headed Cowbirds.

Of the original 185 sets, 120 are still intact, and almost all of them are in museums, libraries, and universities, some available for the public to see. Between 1920 and 1989, 42 complete sets were broken up in America, which is where almost every loose print on the market today comes from. “They are extremely limited,” Steiner says. He points to a framed print of Audubon’s Black Vulture on his wall. “There are only 42 copies of that floating around — well, 41, actually, because I have one.”

He and Peg have 44 of the large prints, all of them framed by Bill using archival materials and many types of wood, including walnut, cherry, red oak, white oak, chinaberry, and tulip poplar.

The Steiners keep a bit of room for more, should any of the elusive prints land within reach. “I have always loved birds,” says Steiner. “I like the freedom of flight. I like that a rare bird can suddenly just show up, and then disappear.  I enjoy reading about them and sharing stories with other psycho bird watchers.  All of that kind of forced me into a mentality of spending huge amounts of money on old pieces of paper.”

Bill Steiner’s book Audubon Art Prints: A Collector’s Guide to Every Edition is available on eBay and Amazon. The Steiners’ Audubon prints will be featured as part of A Telling Instinct: John James Audubon & Contemporary Art, an exhibit that opens Friday, Feb. 21 and runs through Monday, May 4 at Asheville Art Museum (2 South Pack Square). For updates, see ashevilleart.org.

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