Plate 130 Yellow-winged Sparrow 

John James Audubon made this watercolor and graphite drawing, Plate 130 Yellow-winged Sparrow, sometime in the first half of the 19th century. Audubon was not only an artist, but also an ornithologist, someone who studies birds, and a naturalist. He created this image as part of his project to document all the birds of America. It’s part of a long tradition of natural history illustration, where the goal is to capture and classify the natural world. But of course, even scientific illustration is shaped by cultural and social contexts. Audubon wasn’t just objectively recording data; he was participating in the 19th-century vision of humans mastering and understanding the natural world. We might also think about how the classification of species has historical links with the classification of race within the human species. It's worth remembering that Audubon made his name as a naturalist at a time when the United States was expanding westwards, a process that was displacing Indigenous peoples and reshaping the environment. To understand this image fully, we might turn to archives, historical documents, and scientific literature.