Classic bird paintings

Ruby-throated Hummingbird painting: Audubon's plate and other classic portraits

John James Audubon painted the Ruby-throated Hummingbird as plate 47 of The Birds of America (1827–38): males, females and young on a trumpet creeper, under the name Ruby-throated Humming Bird. A free high-resolution scan is on Audubon.org. The pair shown here is from John Gould's A Monograph of the Trochilidae (1849–61).

Updated

A male hummingbird with a ruby-red throat perched and a green female hovering beside a plant with pink flowers
Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, male and female, from John Gould's monograph of the hummingbirds. John Gould, A Monograph of the Trochilidae (1849–61)

About this painting

This male and hovering female are from John Gould's A Monograph of the Trochilidae (1849–61), his book on the hummingbirds of the world. Our guide to John Gould explains how its shining throats were printed.

Audubon’s Ruby-throated Hummingbird: plate 47, “Ruby-throated Humming Bird”

Audubon's plate shows a busy group of hummingbirds on a trumpet creeper, Bignonia radicans: flying, feeding, preening and courting. He called the bird “this glittering fragment of the rainbow.”

At the beginning of one April he met crowds of them moving east along the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, just arriving in the United States. After one very cold morning many were picked up dead on the beaches, and the rest were so numb that his party could almost catch them by hand. He also wrote of a keeper in Lower Louisiana who kept hummingbirds for twelve months on fresh flowers in a warm room with gauze windows, then set them free.

Story: Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, vols. 1 (1831) and 5 (1839). See plate 47 free at Audubon.org.

More classic portraits, free to see

  • John James Audubon, The Birds of America, octavo edition (1840–44), plate 253: “Ruby-throated Humming bird”. Free scan (New York Public Library Digital Collections)
  • Louis Agassiz Fuertes, for Elon H. Eaton’s Birds of New York (1910–14), plate 66: “Ruby-throated Hummingbird”. Free scan (Internet Archive)

About the Ruby-throated Hummingbird

  • Besides drinking nectar, Ruby-throated Hummingbirds take insects and spiders, even from spider webs. (Source: National Audubon Society)

The oldest known wild Ruby-throated Hummingbird lived at least 11 years and 1 month: it was banded in Illinois in 2014 and found there again in 2024. That is a record from bird banding, not a typical lifespan. (Source: USGS Bird Banding Laboratory, 2025 longevity table.) How long do wild birds live?

Buying a print?

An original plate 47 is a hand-colored sheet about 26 by 38 inches, printed in Britain in 1827–38; many prints sold today are reproductions or small 1840s octavo prints. How to tell an original from a reproduction.

In a Birdfolio, the hardcover book of your own life list, this painting sits beside the Ruby-throated Hummingbird with the date and place you first saw one. See your own list as a book, free.