Beyond Audubon: Exploring The Colonial World Of The Birds Of America

Beyond Audubon: Exploring The Colonial World Of The Birds Of America runs at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow on Saturday 3 October and Saturday 24 October, both from 1pm to 3.30pm. It's a pair of roundtable workshops looking at John James Audubon and the colonial world that sat behind his Birds of America.

Most of us know Audubon as the man who painted those huge, detailed birds, but the workshops dig into the life he lived before and around the work. He was born Jean Jacques Rabin in Saint-Domingue — now Haiti — to a plantation-owning father, six years before the Haitian Revolution. The sessions don't shy away from the darker side of that history: he bought and sold enslaved people, benefited from unacknowledged enslaved labour and from the local knowledge of Native American peoples, and killed and posed most of the birds before drawing them.

The College has a direct link to the work, too. Its library bought volumes one and two of the first edition of the double-elephant-folio books back in 1838, and one is still on show. The workshops are part of the College's anti-racist approach to its historic collections and run as part of Black History Month 2026.

Both sessions run from 1pm to 3.30pm at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, 232-242 St Vincent Street in the city centre. Entry is free.