Ivory-billed Woodpeckers

Ivory-billed Woodpeckers

Joseph Bartholomew Kidd

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last seen in 1944 and thought to be extinct, the ivory-billed woodpecker has recently been sighted several times in a national wildlife refuge in Arkansas. Here depicted life-size, the ivory-bill is the largest of its genus in North America; Audubon referred to it as "this great chieftain of the woodpecker tribe," and it was also dubbed "the Lord God bird," for the exclamation it elicited from those who saw it. Audubon made his watercolor of the ivory-bill (New-York Historical Society) before 1826, and commissioned Kidd to copy it and other of his bird subjects in oil for display in a traveling exhibition Audubon planned but never realized. The copyist added the landscape background.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ivory-billed WoodpeckersIvory-billed WoodpeckersIvory-billed WoodpeckersIvory-billed WoodpeckersIvory-billed Woodpeckers

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.